There is of course no definitive history of SoftICE. At this point there isn't even a list of everyone who has worked on it. I didn't come to the company until after Compuware had taken over, and most of the original folks had gone by then. But here's a little of the past I've been able to cobble together.
A long, long time ago, when DOS was king and people were still getting excited about Intel's new 386 processor (we're talking 1987 here), a small company with the unlikely name of NuMega Technologies created a debugger for DOS machines. At the time, debuggers were pretty limited beasts, and when things got difficult, the few well-equipped programmers who were lucky enough to have one would reach for an ICE, or in-circuit emulator. This device gave the programmer all sorts of control over the execution of her program, but it worked by physically replacing the processor in the system. ICEs were, and are, expensive and complicated, and most programmers couldn't afford them. The alternative was to use a debugger.
It's hard to imagine in these days of graphics, multitasking operating systems, and programming IDEs that include graphical debuggers, but back in 1987 the most common debugger was debug.com, which shipped with DOS. It had a number of simple functions, but it was pretty limited compared to an ICE.
But then the 386 processor came out, and the world began to change. The 386 had a number of interesting features, one of which was this: it was capable of running DOS and other 16-bit applications within a sandbox controlled by another application. This feature was called Virtual Machine Mode, because the 16-bit application ran within a virtual machine set up and managed by another application.
The founders of NuMega realized that with Virtual Machine mode, it was possible to write a debugger which could maintain complete control over DOS or any other 16-bit application running on the machine. Such a debugger would have a level of control previously found only in a hardware ICE, which would make it very powerful indeed. So they did what all the other software companies were doing at the time, and stuck together a word and an acronym to create a name for their product. Thus SoftICE was born, the software that acted like an ICE.
In 1987, SoftICE won an award from BYTE magazine. Remember them?
To be continued...
Copyright 2004, Geoff Hickey. All rights reserved.