"The novice machine language programmer often does not have an assembler. Without an assembler, the programmer must assemble the program by hand, and then enter it by hand. Even a small program could require hundreds of POKEs followed by hundreds of PEEKs to verify that everything has been entered correctly.
A good monitor gets around these problems. It allows the programmer to examine memory locations sequentially. As each location is examined, the operator has the option of changing it or looking at the next one. A good monitor program also allows the operator to list a range of memory all at once. A third monitor feature allows the operator to move a range of memory to a new location in the computer. A final feature in a good monitor is the ability to execute and return from a machine language program."
I seem to recall from my C64 days that "monitor" was a term for a type of utility program that would let you view memory contents and load data into memory. That seems to be similar to what this project is doing.
