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The first hardware debugger that I had the pleasure of using was for the SNES - Super Nintendo Entertainment System - around about 1988/9.
Not many people know that the development hardware for the SNES was designed by Sony. We were doing some work for Sony and we got our system direct from them. We (unintentionally) caused a fall out between Sony and NOA (Nintendo of America) when we asked NOA how to do something on the dev kit and they discovered we had the kit before they did.
As for Micro Controllers, I've never had my hands on any devkit better than your Inchworm. I must get around to adding my comments to the review thread.
Atmel and Microchip weren't even an idea when the first ones came out. Intel had what they called an In Circuit Emulator (ICE) in the mid 70s starting with the 8080 (there may well have been one for the 4040). They were big, cranky monsters. All the microprocessor vendors had ICEs for their chips so it's hard to say who was first. I would think intel or motorola. Basically they were the outgrowth of logic analyzers.
I had an ICE86 which I hated because it was basically a crutch. I saw too many engineers relying on it instead of using logic and a simple debug monitor to deduce the problem. I could usually track down a bug in less time than it took to power the thing up and go though all the riggamarole to get it working.
We built hardware debuggers for the 8008 (predecessor of the 8080) in 1971. Before that we had hardware debuggers for the TTL logic units that we designed in 1967. They used 4K EMM core stacks with about a 1 microsecond access time.
If you count sw interrupt instructions, that goes way back. The 80386 had internal context dump (ICE support). I *think* it also had breakpoint registers.
The Motorola 6809 had a software interrupt instruction ca. 1982, and the 6502 of KIM-I, PET, and Apple fame had a single byte BRK instruction ca.1976, and the 8080/8085, ca. 1974 had the RESTART instructions, seven of them plus RST 0 which was equivalent to a RESET.
In the early 80's we used Intel and Motorola, mostly motorola. And the 8" floppy drives cluck and clunked as you stepped through code it hit a break point. ADC maybe, do not recall the name.
I owned a MetaICE 8031/51 but sold it on ebay a year or so ago.. 5.25 floppies with that bad boy..
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