The Queen’s Awards for Export and Technological Achievement celebrate their silver anniversary this year and as befits such an occasion both award categories broke records in terms of the number of awards granted. There were 1,355 applicants vying for 175 awards of which 126 were granted for export while 49 went to honour technological achievement. Of these the UK computer industry did rather poorly in export, taking one award, but managed to grab six awards for technological achievement, three of which went to STC Plc. Psion UK Plc won the industry’s sole export award for its international revenues from its Organiser II hand-held computer range for the three year period 1986 to 1989. Psion exports its products to over 40 countries and overseas customers include Westpac Banking Corp, Sony, Volvo and Hasselblad. The Organiser is even to be found as far afield as the People’s Republic of China, Hungary (where it was used to check election returns) and the not so United States of Soviet Russia. Three STC subsidiaries won an award for technological achievement helping to justify the UKP271m the group ploughed into research and development in 1989: ICL gets one for its General Merchandise System designed to support 100 electronic point of sale terminals and hold more than 200,000 price look-up items; STC Technology bags one for its technology to improve the process to exploit the combined advantages of bipolar and CMOS devices in the same integrated circuit (as used by STC for the Telepoint service); and STC Submarine Systems wins one for developing an optical fibre submarine communications cable with a data transmission rate of 420Mb per second. Complementing this last award is one for British Telecom’s Main Optical Networks Division for its work on designing and building optical receivers for submarine cable systems. Staying with telecommunications, GEC Plessey Telecommunications Ltd’ System X digital public exchange also, in the nick of time (see below), won a Queen’s Award for Technology. And last but by no means least Micro Focus Group Plc gets a well-deserved pat of recognition for its Cobol/2 Workbench but appears to be more excited about a new company employee called Jerome Garfunkel (see below).
