Lt. Kernal

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Lt. Kernal was the name given to a SCSI hard drive subsystem developed for the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 home computers. The original design of both the technically complicated hardware interface and equally complex disk operating system came from Lloyd Sponenburgh and Roy Southwick of Fiscal Information, Inc., a now-defunct Florida-based turnkey vendor of minicomputer-based medical information systems. Fiscal demonstrated a working prototype in 1984 and starting advertising the system for sale early in 1985. It immediately found a niche with some Commodore software developers and bulletin board SysOps of the day, due to its excellent performance and capacious storage (originally 10 megabytes and later extended to as much as 330 megabytes). The subsequent development of a multiplexing accessory allowed one Lt. Kernal to be shared by as many as 16 computers, using a round 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.