That version was widely distributed, and it was regarded as the first full-featured version of the Linux kernel. There was, by then, a sizeable community of users who depended on a stable version of the kernel. Version 0.99pl15, with a few fixes, was the basis of these two systems. Some important fixes moved 1.0.0 to 1.0.9 in the early months of 1994, but that system development path has been unchanged since mid-year. By contrast, 1.1.0 underwent over 50 changes in the first 10 months.
Plans are now afoot for the next major release.
Its twin, version 1.3.0, will be the basis of yet more experimental work on the kernel. One thing that also happened with the Great Release was the release itself no longer catalogued its changes. All during the development of the kernel, concurrent development was being done on the tools I've mentioned, as well as others. One of the topics of discussion by users was what they collected for their system. One can copy a friend's disk set and then bootstrap Linux.