So, I like Linux and I love my C64, but.. Linux are for computers too primitive to come with their own kernel and.... the C64 comes with a kernel and shell right from the factory :P
> The KERNAL was known as kernel[6] inside of Commodore since the PET days, but in 1980 Robert Russell misspelled the word as kernal in his notebooks. When Commodore technical writers Neil Harris and Andy Finkel collected Russell's notes and used them as the basis for the VIC-20 programmer's manual, the misspelling followed them along and stuck.[7]
> According to early Commodore myth, and reported by writer/programmer Jim Butterfield among others, the "word" KERNAL is an acronym (or, more likely, a backronym) standing for Keyboard Entry Read, Network, And Link, which in fact makes good sense considering its role. Berkeley Softworks later used it when naming the core routines of its GUI OS for 8-bit home computers: the GEOS KERNAL.
I had a 6502 machine language book of his as a kid. I figured out in my head what I thought I wanted to do with the various instructions, then wrote out on graph paper the (decimal) number for the op or it’s args, then transcribed the whole affair into memory manually via POKEs. Good times.
Yeah, I should have figured that HN would probably be a place where it'd be okay to write kernal, but then again, someone might point out the spelling difference between the penguin one and the chicken lips one :P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KERNAL
> The KERNAL was known as kernel[6] inside of Commodore since the PET days, but in 1980 Robert Russell misspelled the word as kernal in his notebooks. When Commodore technical writers Neil Harris and Andy Finkel collected Russell's notes and used them as the basis for the VIC-20 programmer's manual, the misspelling followed them along and stuck.[7]
> According to early Commodore myth, and reported by writer/programmer Jim Butterfield among others, the "word" KERNAL is an acronym (or, more likely, a backronym) standing for Keyboard Entry Read, Network, And Link, which in fact makes good sense considering its role. Berkeley Softworks later used it when naming the core routines of its GUI OS for 8-bit home computers: the GEOS KERNAL.