5 ms·

So, who's to blame for the blatant spelling error?

dewyatt 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KERNAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KERNAL
georgecmu 9y ago
Robert Russel: 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 maybe 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.
- dbcurtis 9y ago
  Having been Bob Russel's room mate for a while in college, I'm going to go strongly with the random spelling error theory :)
  - jharger 9y ago
    I did a search on Bob Russel and found a wiki article entitled "Robert Russell (Programmierer)" I was hoping this was a joke on his bad spelling, but then I realized the article was in German. Oh well.
  - johansch 9y ago
    Please do spill! :)
    - dbcurtis 9y ago
      Not much to say. Bob and I and a small handfull of others showed up as freshman with "personal computers" that we had soldered together from kits. Which is how you got one in those days. Audio cassette tape mass storage. We of course found each other pretty quickly. (And all of us spell like engineers.) Eventually Bob and I became the first two kids on campus with Apple II's, integer basic and 16k DRAM which we quickly upgraded. When Apple finally started shipping floppy drives Bob had his order in ahead of me, and the store got two. The store kept one as a demo unit so I had to wait like 6 weeks for the second allocation. I was burning with jealousy. I remember Bob had already accepted a job with Sperry Univac when Commodore insisted that he fly out for an interview. He went on a lark for free travel. According to his stories at the time, he was a bit of a crank during the interview since he had no intention of taking the job. This was before the VIC-20, so Commodore's had those lame chicklette keyboards and other lameness. He kept saying "My Apple can do this, why can't you do this?" Somehow, instead of interpreting his criticism as attitude, they were convinced he was a visionary. Go figure. So they paid what he asked and he played key roles on VIC-20 and C64. History could be very different if he had ended up at Univac. The C64 looks a lot like ideas that were first floated during BS sessions among our gang.
      - johansch 9y ago
        Well, that was interesting. I really enjoyed playing Pit Stop II on my friend's C64 back in like '85. It was way better than my own ZX81 at graphical games. I do sort of remember idly wondering which people built this marvel, already back then. Since then I've read a bunch of books etc, but a personal connection is hard to beat! Thanks for the story!
  - glangdale 9y ago
    The first file I browsed in the source contained repeated uses of the verb "INITILIZE", so the evidence seems strong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KERNAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KERNAL

Robert Russel: 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 maybe 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.

dbcurtis 9y ago
Having been Bob Russel's room mate for a while in college, I'm going to go strongly with the random spelling error theory :)
- jharger 9y ago
  I did a search on Bob Russel and found a wiki article entitled "Robert Russell (Programmierer)" I was hoping this was a joke on his bad spelling, but then I realized the article was in German. Oh well.
- johansch 9y ago
  Please do spill! :)
  - dbcurtis 9y ago
    Not much to say. Bob and I and a small handfull of others showed up as freshman with "personal computers" that we had soldered together from kits. Which is how you got one in those days. Audio cassette tape mass storage. We of course found each other pretty quickly. (And all of us spell like engineers.) Eventually Bob and I became the first two kids on campus with Apple II's, integer basic and 16k DRAM which we quickly upgraded. When Apple finally started shipping floppy drives Bob had his order in ahead of me, and the store got two. The store kept one as a demo unit so I had to wait like 6 weeks for the second allocation. I was burning with jealousy. I remember Bob had already accepted a job with Sperry Univac when Commodore insisted that he fly out for an interview. He went on a lark for free travel. According to his stories at the time, he was a bit of a crank during the interview since he had no intention of taking the job. This was before the VIC-20, so Commodore's had those lame chicklette keyboards and other lameness. He kept saying "My Apple can do this, why can't you do this?" Somehow, instead of interpreting his criticism as attitude, they were convinced he was a visionary. Go figure. So they paid what he asked and he played key roles on VIC-20 and C64. History could be very different if he had ended up at Univac. The C64 looks a lot like ideas that were first floated during BS sessions among our gang.
    - johansch 9y ago
      Well, that was interesting. I really enjoyed playing Pit Stop II on my friend's C64 back in like '85. It was way better than my own ZX81 at graphical games. I do sort of remember idly wondering which people built this marvel, already back then. Since then I've read a bunch of books etc, but a personal connection is hard to beat! Thanks for the story!
- glangdale 9y ago
  The first file I browsed in the source contained repeated uses of the verb "INITILIZE", so the evidence seems strong.