Bengt Werner was one of the first people to work on the simulator that would become Simics, way back in 1992. On my Intel Blog, I published an interview with Bengt a while back where we discuss the early days of Simics and the original product vision and use cases.
Much of the vision has remained remarkably intact – building a fast simulator to run real software as a primary driver, along with features like checkpointing and determinism and a modular architecture. The main use case changed in an interesting way:
Although we pitched Simics as a cache analysis tool in our research collaboration with industry, it was soon discovered that this kind of a tool is a great help when developing software, in particular parts that interfaced hardware.
Read the whole article to read more of Bengt’s insights and recollections from the pre-commercial days of Simics.
This is probably the last post in the series of “Simics 20 years”, since the birthday of the commercial product was around June last in 1998.