SoftICE

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~ the obituary ~

SoftICE is a name I read far more often than I ran. It turns up in the readme files and the forum threads of the era I was online for, always with the same tone, the tone people use for a tool that is one level more serious than the one they have. Kernel debugging was never my layer. I know exactly what the name meant to the people it did belong to, which is not the same as having used it.

Frank Grossman and Jim Moskun wrote it for DOS in 1987 and priced it at $386, which was a joke about the 80386 processor it was written in assembly for. That price is the whole personality of the product. It did not run as a program on top of the operating system. It ran below it and stopped everything at once, so that when it had control there was nothing left underneath that could lie to you.

Through the 1990s it followed Windows up the stack, and by 1998 the codebase had been ported to Windows NT. The people writing the book Undocumented Windows used it to find out what Microsoft had not written down. If you were building a device driver on a single machine in that decade, this was the thing that told you where your driver had died.

~ the case file ~

~ the two audiences ~

SoftICE had a legitimate customer base of driver developers and an illegitimate one of roughly the same size. A debugger that stops the operating system and shows you memory is also the instrument for taking apart a copy protection routine, and the crack scene of the late 1990s ran on it. The evidence of that is in the protection software of the era: vendors started shipping detection code specifically to notice SoftICE running and refuse to start, which was answered by extensions written specifically to hide it. Two products in an arms race, one of them sold in a box with a support number.

~ what happened to it ~

Compuware acquired NuMega in December 1997 in a stock deal, mostly for BoundsChecker and the Windows NT testing tools, and SoftICE came along inside the package. It became part of DriverStudio, a bundle for driver developers, and inside a bundle it stopped being a product with its own momentum. Version 4.05 shipped in 2000 and nothing shipped after it. Windows XP was the last operating system it ever supported.

On 3 April 2006 Compuware discontinued the entire DriverStudio family, citing technical and business issues along with general market conditions. Maintenance support ran until 31 March 2007 and then that ended too. The company sold its testing business to Micro Focus in 2009, by which point there was nothing left to sell.

~ the long tail ~

Nothing replaced it exactly. Syser Debugger and Rasta Ring 0 Debugger picked up some of the users, and Microsoft's own WinDbg picked up more, but WinDbg wants two machines and a cable between them. The specific thing SoftICE did, which was to give one person one machine and total authority over it, quietly stopped being how Windows worked. Driver signing arrived, and then 64-bit Windows closed the door properly with kernel patch protection. The tool did not lose an argument. The platform it assumed simply stopped existing.

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