yup, and since it was it was on a chip, it didn't take up any memory either... yup, and since it was it was on a chip, it didn't take up any memory either...Not correct. There was a reason that the Commodore 64 powered up and displayed around 32k RAM free. The basic interpreter and kernel were copied from ROM into RAM at power up for execution (fetching instructions from RAM is much faster than ROM) and other parts of RAM were used for OS housekeeping, etc.
The bigger games/programs for the C64 would "kick" the basic interpreter out of RAM to get that space free which required restarting the machine when the program finished.