Background
Traditionally, all computers and operating systems have included a maintenance function, used to determine whether a program is working correctly. Debug was written by Tim Paterson to serve this purpose in QDOS. When Paterson began working for Microsoft in the early 1980s he brought the program with him. Debug was part of DOS 1.00 and has been included in MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. MS-DOS debug has several limitations:
- It can only access 16-bit registers and not 32-bit extended registers.
- When the "n" subcommand for naming files is used the filename is stored from offset DS:5D to DS:67 meaning that the program can only save files in FAT 8.3 filename format.
- MS-DOS Debug can only access conventional memory, which is the first 640 kB in an IBM PC.
32-bit Debug clones, such as FreeDOS Debug, have been written.
Read more about this topic: Debug (command)
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