SPICE

SPICE is a general-purpose circuit simulation program for nonlinear dc, nonlinear transient, and linear ac analyses. As an early public domain software program with source code available, SPICE was widely distributed and used. Its ubiquity became such that "to SPICE a circuit" remains synonymous with circuit simulation. SPICE source code was from the beginning distributed by UC Berkeley for a nominal charge (to cover the cost of magnetic tape). It was in widespread use on VMS and Unix mainframes, and later on PC computers in education, industry and military.

Although SPICE has roots in 1973, it was not available on personal computers until commercial PSPICE in 1984 for IBM PC. The home computers from 8 bit computer era (CP/M, Apple II, ZX Spectrum, C64 ...), but also some early 16 bit computers (IBM PC with less than 512K, Commodore Amiga 1000, Texas Instruments TI89) were considered too weak to host SPICE. The free version was not available for PC computers until 386 age. Also, its source code written in Fortran and converted to C is not easy to understand.

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