alt Hacker NewsI got a VIC-20 when I was about 12? Jim Butterfield loomed impossibly large over all things Commodore at that time. One of the first things I typed in on it was his TINYMON, a <1kbyte “monitor” (for some reason resident debuggers were frequently called monitors in early microcomputing) before I had any idea what it was.
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The "monitor" term is not from early microcomputing but from early computing. I believe that "monitor" referring to a display monitor, and referring to a machine language debugger all have the same origin: they date back to directly monitoring the electrical signals from equipment to observe its workings. The use of "monitoring" in profiling (e.g. gprof and its gmon.out file, etc) is also the same.
for some reason resident debuggers were frequently called monitors in early microcomputing
I think it's more like "for some reason, monitors are called debuggers in later microcomputing."
I didn't realize he was Canadian - as a child I got so much mileage out of Machine Language for the Commodore 64[0]. I used to think of my program, get out sheets of graph paper and flip through a table of opcodes I wanted to use, get their decimal rep, and write out the list of numbers in a long column, then go to my computer and POKE them into place and watch a spite come to life, or the screen change colour. So much fun had with that book.
[0] https://archive.org/details/Machine_Language_for_the_Commodo...