>I remember "inventing" this technique a long time ago when I wanted to figure out which bad network card was taking down an entire LAN. Clearly it's been in use for a long time before then but I was never taught about it and I haven't seen it on any kind of curriculum.
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>My guess is a lot of people who have done significant troubleshooting of some kind have figured this out on their own, or been mentored by someone familiar with it.
I learned it back in the batch days from some guys at IBM.
Back then - before debugging was around - we'd do a binary chop of the data to see which record was exposing the issue. It was tedious but it never failed.
With debugging, it's rarely needed.