[msla]

The Commodore 64 doesn't come with a mere kernel, it comes with a mighty KERNAL

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.

[bch]

> Jim Butterfield

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.

[dusted]

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

[westmeal]

The mighty KERNAL is how us mere mortals can JSR FFD2. (I think that's right)

[mdp2021]

> JSR [$]FFD2. (I think that's right)

Yes, that is the "print char in A and inc screen pos" in the lookup table for the actual subroutine.

[westmeal]

Yup! Crazy how you can remember the dumbest shit after years.

[jandrese]

I wonder what the "Network" part of that referred to? The C64 didn't have much networking capability built in.