I mentioned <i>before</i> PC in my comment to your comment right? You are still going on about PCs; I was not referring to PCs   but rather MSX, CPC, Amiga etc. They had distinct RAM &amp; VRAM (in the case of the MSX the cool machines had 128kb-256kb RAM &amp; 128kb VRAM and you could not map one to the other =&gt; it was really different memory) and when you used text input screens you were wasting 112kb of memory if you didn&#x27;t do this. The memory was slower to access from the CPU but it was much <i>much</i> faster than disks.<p>Not confused, just not talking about PCs in general (although I have heard cases of this happening there but that might be just indeed demo groups); I still do this on those old computers today for hobby purposes (the last work I did was somewhere end 90s on a legacy system which counted on video memory and which had to be ported so I had to remove &amp; test that &#x27;feature&#x27;) ; there just isn&#x27;t another way to get memory if you don&#x27;t want to cheat (and solder in 1024kb).<p>Edit: I don&#x27;t know if it was used in practice because there were so many different VGA cards, but [1] shows that it was common to have 256kb on a card which, depending on the era, was significant. And like said above, for business applications in text based environments (screen 0) you can use a large portion of video memory for storage while you still see something. But I can see the issue there; with other computers we didn&#x27;t have that issue as you could trust a certain amount to be there for sure.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.osdever.net&#x2F;FreeVGA&#x2F;vga&#x2F;vgamem.htm#detect" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.osdever.net&#x2F;FreeVGA&#x2F;vga&#x2F;vgamem.htm#detect</a>