- Lt. Kernal
Lt. Kernal was the name given to a
SCSI hard drive subsystem developed for theCommodore 64 andCommodore 128 home computer s. The original design of both the technically complicated hardware interface and equally complexdisk operating system came fromLloyd Sponenburgh and Roy Southwick of Fiscal Information, Inc., a now-defunctFlorida -basedturnkey vendor ofminicomputer -based medical information systems.Fiscal demonstrated a working
prototype in1984 and starting advertising the system for sale early in1985 . It immediately found a niche with some Commodore software developers and bulletin boardSysOp s of the day, due to its excellent performance and capacious storage (originally 10megabytes and later extended to as much as 330megabytes ). The subsequent development of a multiplexing accessory allowed one Lt. Kernal to be shared by as many as 16 computers, using around robin scheduling algorithm . This made the use of the Lt. Kernal with multiple line BBSs practical. Later,streaming tape support, using QIC-02 tape cartridges, was added to provide a practical (though costly) backup strategy.A key feature of the Lt. Kernal was its sophisticated disk operating system, which behaved much like that of the Point 4
minicomputer s that Fiscal was reselling in the 1980s. A high degree of control over the Lt. Kernal was possible with simple typed commands, many of which had never been seen before in the eight bit Commodore environment. This, along with a powerful keyed random access filing system, made the Lt. Kernal perform at a level that was generally unmatched by any other hard drive system available for eight bit Commodore computers.Fiscal built the units to order until late
1986 , at which time the decision was made to turn over the production, marketing and customer support to Xetec Inc. Fiscal continued to provide secondary technical support, as well as free DOS upgrades, until December1991 , at which time production of new Lt. Kernal systems ceased. Following the shutdown of Xetec in 1995, private support of the Lt. Kernal was carried on for several years byRon Fick until his untimely death in 1999.External links
* [http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/ltk Lt. Kernal Data Archive]
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