Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874127 VRAM is also where many "online" development suites—the BA

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874127 VRAM is also where many "online" development suites—the BASICs and Pascals of the time—expected you to write exception traces. Rather than trying to "break into" a debugger (i.e. cram a debugger into the same address space as your software), you'd simply have your trap-handler persist the stack-trace to VRAM, switch your tape drive over to the devtools disk, and reboot. The "monitor" would load, notice that there's a stack-trace in VRAM, parse it, read the pages it mentions from your program (now on the slave tape) and display them.