Well you're a friendly chap, aren't you? As it turns out, yes I was actually... I read his first USENET post announcing his project and was one of the first users and then kernel developers in Australia. Linux was just as much of a re-implementation as 386BSD was, as Bill Jolitz rewrote his version pretty much completely. Nobody had the sense of "this is a new OS" in the way that Archimedes, Commodore, Apple ][. Amstrad or just about every microcomputer had at the time.

So if you want to talk about pathetic, let's turn the blowtorch towards you. For the sake of a disagreement over the scope of "new", you have tried to take your cock out and piss all over someone with more history and knowledge. There are varying levels for how new things can be, and the reimplementation of Unix for 386 CPUs (only because they had MMUs) was never seen as especially innovative or sufficient, and certainly not enough to warrant the claim of being a new OS.

You would need over 30 years to know that, you n00b.