Hewlett-Packard Co has gone to Insignia Solutions Inc for MS-DOS and Unix integration capabilities for on its HP 9000 Unix family. Insignia’s SoftPC product is described as an all-software PC emulator, providing software emulation of the Intel iAPX-86 microprocessor family to run MS-DOS applications unchanged on alien processors. The product als supports concurrent operation and data sharing between HP-UX and MS-DOS programs on the Hewlett machines. SoftPC also interacts with standard personal computer peripherals assumed to be there, by intercepting commands to the peripheral controllers, simulating them, and substituting equivalent operations relevant to the host system. Insignia, of Sunnyvale, California, was founded in the UK in 1985, and SoftPC was the result of two years work by a team of 25 British computer scientists. The company began shipping OEM versions of SoftPC in the US last year. At the beginning of this month, the company began shipping end-user versions for Apple Macintosh and Sun 3 hardware. Other OEM vendors include Tektronix and Silicon Graphics.
