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"debug" was truly the devil's spawn. Yet, it was always there. You always needed it at the time you had no other tool available, so you had to struggle through. Therapy was mandatory after any use of that utility.

Looks like Windows XP was the last version to ship with it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debug_(command)

(not only does it not support x64, but it never even supported 32-bit from the looks of it!)

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I used debug to write some moderately serious (~5k lines of code) toy programs in assembly. It worked. Labeling it with insults is historical revisionism; it was part of the basic toolkit for how you hacked around on DOS computers of the time.

I learned a ton about low-level computer operations from using debug. It's more than an assembler, it's also a runtime environment with breakpoints and a debugger, and a hex editor. It really manipulates everything going on with the computer at a byte-by-byte level. I wouldn't have learned all that quite the same way from any "real" tools like MASM or the Norton debugger.

I used to use debug on win2k PCs in my school to futz with the VGA card as a kid. Good times.

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