[GianFabien]

Back a long time ago, before GB memories and MMUs, the executable code was loaded at low addresses, statically allocated data followed, then dynamically allocated memory (heap). So stack was placed at the very top of memory and grew down. When heap and stack collided it signaled an out of memory situation.

[bjourne]

To detect collisions you'd need write-protected memory. Afaik, most computers from the era you are thinking of did not have write-protected memory.

[_e8at]

makes sense