Device numbers, per established documentation, are restricted to the range However, this limitation came from the specific adaptation of the IEEE-488 protocol and, in effect, applies only to external peripherals. With all relevant KERNAL system calls vectored, programmers can intercept system calls to implement virtual devices with any address in the range of [32,256. Conceivably, one can load a device driver binary into memory, patch the KERNAL I/O vectors, and from that moment forward, a new (virtual) device could be addressed. So far, this capability has never been publicly known as utilized, presumably for two reasons: (1) The KERNAL provides no means for dynamically allocating device IDs, and (2) the KERNAL provides no means for loading a relocatable binary image. Thus, the burden of collisions both in I/O space and in memory space falls upon the user, while platform compatibility across a wide range of machines falls upon the software author. Nonetheless, support software for these functions could easily be implemented if desired.