Re: Compuware abondoning SoftIce and the DriverStudio suite

There was also Periscope and the Atron, both of which were DOS debuggers and
for processors of 386 vintage or earlier. Periscope was interesting in that
it was a software debugger and hardware debugger. You could just buy the
pieces you needed and it worked. Today the only thing that can replace it
is an ICE, which are really expensive.

<440gtx@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1145429794.501693.137860@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I recall the halcyon years of softice. It was such a great tool 10 or
15 years ago; one of the best tools ever invented. It astonished many
on how easily it could debug real mode, 16-bit mode, and 32-bit mode
all at once with source level and ran on Dos, Windows 3x, Win9x, and
NT. Softice gave everyone quick, powerful source level debugging on a
single machine meanwhile many kernel guys were saying real men use
assembly level debug over a slow serial cable. But softice was left to
become stale over the years and became part of a bundle that was too
expensive and the rest of the bundle had little value. Meanwhile windbg
became better, was free, and vmware allowed for single machine debug,
none of which Compuware seemed to respond to and in fact softice lost
much of its appeal by offering just the crudest 64-bit windows support.


Softice falls in as the second most amazing debugger ever. My best ever
award goes to Borland's Turbo Debugger in the Dos days. What it could
do was absolutely unheard of in those days; a full screen debugger with
individual window views, handling apps with direct screen writes,
handling apps that rerouted interrupt vectors like the keyboard,
hardware breakpoints, source level debug, symbolic watch windows,
following pointers by mouse clicks, and more. It was truly an F-14 in
the years of the biplane.



.

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