SoftICE was originally produced by the company NuMega, and was subsequently acquired by Compuware in 1997, which in turn sold the property to Micro Focus in 2009.
The original SoftICE for DOS was written in 1987 by NuMega founders Frank Grossman and Jim Moskun.
The program, written in 80386 assembly language, played the role of an operating system and ran software in virtual 8086 mode.
Compuware therefore offered SoftICE as a subscription so that it could be kept up to date and in sync with the latest Microsoft Windows version.
As of April 3, 2006, the DriverStudio product family has been discontinued because of "a variety of technical and business issues as well as general market conditions".
For example, here is code some vendors used to detect the presence of SoftICE running in the same machine as an early countermeasure: More and better such measures have evolved since.
[7] A modern successor to SoftICE named BugChecker (unrelated to the one mentioned above) was released by Vito Plantamura in 2023.
To achieve this, the debugger spoofs the machine as being debugged by a second system by intercepting serial cable communication, and then and draws its display directly to the framebuffer.
This method significantly improves stability and compatibility compared to previous approaches, including that of SoftICE itself.