In 1973, SPICE was introduced to the world by Professor Donald O. Pederson of the University of California at Berkeley, and a new era of computer-aided design (CAD) tools was born. As its name implies, SPICE is a "Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis." You give it a description of an electrical circuit, made up of resistors, capacitors, inductors, and power sources, and SPICE will predict the performance of that circuit. Instead of bread-boarding new designs in the lab, circuit designers found they could optimize their designs on computers–in effect, using computers to build better computers. Since its introduction, SPICE has been commercialized and released in a dozen variants, such as H-SPICE, P-SPICE, and ADVICE.

Learn more about circuit simulation from the resources on this site, listed below. You might even acquire a taste for SPICE by running examples online.