Queen’s Award for Technological Achievement winner Insignia Solutions Ltd, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, which has its US base in Mountain View, California, is now shipping its $550 third-generation emulator SoftPC 3.0 with Windows for the RS/6000 and SoftPC 3.1 with Windows for Hewlett-Packard Co workstations. It is Insignia’s first implementation for IBM Corp kit. The Windows 3.1 code and MS-DOS 5 are pre-installed. Insignia promises Windows applications will offer native 80486 performance. To speed up Windows performance, SoftPC 3.0 includes special Windows display and mouse drivers that map Windows display and mouse instructions directly to the Motif environment. It provides 80286 real and protected mode emulation, an important addition to 3.0. Hewlett, which previously sold SoftPC direct, will be co-marketing the product with Insignia, which will be making all the sales itself. Insignia has something like 100 engineers working on its line.
