[mshroyer]

The abbreviation I know is "in-circuit emulator", but wouldn't know if that's what they were referring to

[082349872349872]

this. (but of course I almost never powered it up without thinking of Gibson's "black ice"; cf Burning Chrome)

incidentally, Burning Chrome's description of how Automatic Jack lost his arm, over Kyiv, was coincidentally prescient...

[numpad0]

And they usually looks and works like a Borg tentacles and assimilated production hardware, despite the "emulator" nomenclature, apparently by tradition from very early days of microprocessors when ICEs actually were alternate implementations for chips it emulates