Today sees the publication of that hangover from Harold Wilson’s campaign for technological revolution, the Queen’s Awards for Export and for Technological Achievement. As usual the computer industry is well represented with companies who will be able to fly the Award flag and use the Award emblem. In fact it is within the communications area that many Awards for Technological Achievement have been won. For example, Plessey Co Plc wins the Award for its multi-role systems switch in military applications, which supports voice, data and facsimilie transmissions and is for use in the battlefield, and for which the company has won UKP100m worth of orders from six sales since 1984; while Marconi Instruments Ltd gets the Award for its 2955 series of test sets which are computer controlled and are used to test radio transmitters and receivers. Meanwhile, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire-based Crosfield Electronics Ltd wins the award for its Pagefax, a high transmission facsimile that allows editorial offices to send pages, via fax, to printers around the world so that newspapers and magazines can be more up-to-date; users include The Financial Times, The Guardian and Time, which sends pages from the US to be printed in The Netherlands. And the Telecommunications Systems Division of STC gets the Award because of its achievement with flexible access telecommunication systems; while the computer-aided electronic design system jointly developed by Praxis Systems Plc and The VLSI Design & Architectures Division of The Royal Signals and Radar Establishment gained Awards for those two companies. Another innovation winner in communications is Philips Radio Communication Systems Ltd with its PG32 Series, the basis of which is a single chip. The only Award for Technological Achievement won by an information technology company outside of the communication arena was carried off by Miles 33 Plc’s System 400, an electronic composing and publishing system used to print Hansard and other parliamentary papers which has high quality levels for the specification of text abstraction and indexing, and can format pages in seconds. As for exports, Basys International Ltd won an Award its computerised broadcasting systems, as did BICC Data Networks Ltd for its Isolan line which won an Award for Technological Achievement two years ago and is now Europe’s leading product range conforming to the Ethernet 802.3 standard. Nynex Corp’s BIS Banking Systems International Ltd gained an Award for the expansion of its financial consultancy and software (such as the advanced banking and securities system Midas ABS) into Europe and the Asia Pacific region. It has also established a presence in The People’s Republic of China, where it awaits developments. The computer software management consultants Grafton (Database Consultants) Ltd also won an Award for exporting its expertise. Within the financial sector De La Rue Systems Ltd picked up an Award for its banknote counting, sorting and dispensing equipment, as did NCR (Manufacturing) Ltd for the export of self-service banking termi nals. One of the biggest companies to win an Award for Export was GEC Avionics Ltd which has had such success with products like the head-up displays for F-16 Falcon fighter planes that are used in 4,000 aircraft in 16 countries, and the SCADC air-data computer for which it has won a large contract form the US Air Force, Marines and Navy. Moving from one of the largest to one of the smallest companies represented in the Export Awards, the software house Mineral Industries Computing Ltd has won an Award for achieving a worldwide leadership position with its integrated solution for geological and mining applications called Datamine. Other information technology companies on the Export Awards list are Precision Metal Ltd, a winner for the marketing of its satel lite communications antenna, and Technophone Ltd given an Award for sales of its portable cellular radio telephones abroad. Last but by no means least the Targus Group Plc won an Award for exports of its padded computer bags which pr
otect laptops, micros and fax machines as they are distributed throughout the world.
