Kernal

KERNAL

The KERNAL is Commodore's name for the ROM-resident operating system core in its 8-bit home computers; from the original PET of 1977, followed by the extended but strongly related versions used in its successors; the VIC-20, Commodore 64, Plus/4, C16, and C128. The Commodore 8-bit machines' KERNAL consisted of the low-level, close-to-the-hardware OS routines roughly equivalent to the BIOS in IBM PC compatibles (in contrast to the BASIC interpreter routines, also located in ROM) as well as higher-level, device-independent I/O functionality, and was user-callable via a jump table whose central (oldest) part, for reasons of backwards compatibility, remained largely identical throughout the whole 8-bit series. The KERNAL ROM occupies the last 8 KB of the 8-bit CPU's 64 KB address space ($E000-$FFFF).