Kickstart
Description and History
Kickstart is the bootstrap and system ROM kernel routines which comprise the Amiga operating system. Some older versions are loaded from disk.
Originally there was going to be 32K of ROM, as shown on the whiteboard. This capacity increased to 64K of PROM. By the time the development systems became available that Fall, they came with 128K of ROM. However the final mask ROMs were still anticipated to be 64K, in the form of two 32K chips.
1985 saw many changes to the software, Tripos was ported over to the Amiga which then became AmigaDOS and the windowing system was beginning to take shape in the form of Intuition. Layers, CLI and the text-to-speech interface would also be integrated. It soon became clear that 128K of RAM would not be enough to hold the operating system.
So by May, the onboard memory increased to 256K and the OS was now 192K, potentially increasing to 256K. A boot ROM was made, allowing Kickstart to be loaded from disk into a special write-protected memory, also 256K. This was implemented because the code was not yet stable enough to be included in ROM.
The full desktop GUI environment would become known as Workbench.
Versions
V21
V23
V24
V25
V26
V27
V28
V29
1.0
1.1
1.2
1.3
Modules:
Animation
Audio
Console
DOS
Debugger (Wack)
Disk (resource)
Exec
Expansion
Fonts
Gameport
Graphics
Intuition
Input
Keyboard
Keymap
Math
Misc
Narrator
Parallel
Serial
Strap
Text
Trackdisk (device)
Translator
Utility
Workbench
References
- Amiga ROM Kernel Manual (RKM)
