Purify could find memory errors in just a few minutes that would take engineers days or weeks to track down. The dynamic instrumentation capability on existing binaries was huge. The first time I saw it in use was at Sybase. Running a demo version for an hour found enough problems that we instantly sprang for the license.

Didn't IBM Rational buy Purify and make it 10x more expensive?

isn't that IBMs MO? Pretty sure rational was a startup at one point, too.

I used it at Sybase when I interned there in 2009. I've been fascinated by good developer tools ever since. It was such a joy to run, understand the reports and make fixes, and repeat.

>Angel Studios

Was this the company that made Midtown Madness 2?

I think so, after I left.

Purify was awesome back then, before Linux and the open source tools.

(I think Purify might've been the first phoning-home tool I saw, finding a way to email Pure if you exceeded your simultaneous licenses, but I might've misunderstood at the time. Around that time, it was normal for big-ticket Unix workstation software to have network license managers, which were tied with stale NFS mounts at our site as the most common cause of a fleet of expensive engineers on expensive workstations with expensive software all suddenly unable to work. :) )

A related awesome C development tool we used for discovering memory errors before then was the Saber-C debugger. https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c/...

It would talk to your local license server, but it was definitely NOT communicating back to corporate.

What timeframe are you talking about?

I could be mistaken, since I no longer have the files from close to 30 years ago.

But I did think I saw a case in which it would try to email corporate about using too many seats.

It was memorable because that's the first time I saw that, and it seemed clever but invasive.

Late 90s/early 2000s. I definitely spent some time with the licensing code and I know it definitely did nothing like that then.

My experience must've been a little before that (I left that job in the mid-90s).

I could be mistaken. Or maybe the licensing code changed (due the Web explosion, or to evolution of a great product, or some other reason).