I was an engineer at Intel in the 90s and worked on a PCI card for audio codec support. I remember going into one of the PCI test labs the first time and seeing this fantastic hardware setup where all of the PCI signals were mapped into a logic analyzer that could do full rate recording. The processor on the board was also mapped into a LA so you can see CPU side transactions. No doubt in the 90s this equipment was well in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Like any good setup of the time the development machine had a VGA monitor on a Mach 64 as well as a monochrome monitor for SoftICE. It was running in Windows NT 3.51. Ah such good times for a young engineer!

Perhaps best of all, if I had a question the people who designed PCI were on the floor above us.