SoftPC is a software emulator of x86 hardware. It was developed by Rod MacGregor, Henry Nash & Phil Bousfield, following the founding of Insignia Solutions in 1986 By MacGregor, with "about a dozen people who had left the CAD/CAM workstation specialist Computervision", believing in a market opportunity for an independent CAD/CAM consultancy. Originally a side project, SoftPC quickly became the main focus for the company, running PC software on workstations. Originally developed on SPARCstations, the first customer to license the software was Intergraph whose workstation had a proprietary processor architecture. Available originally on UNIX workstations to run MS-DOS, the software was ported to the Macintosh in 1987, and later gained the ability to run

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

software. Besides Mac OS, supported platforms included SGI IRIX,

Sun Solaris Solaris is a proprietary Unix operating system originally developed by Sun Microsystems. After the Sun acquisition by Oracle in 2010, it was renamed Oracle Solaris. Solaris superseded the company's earlier SunOS in 1993, and became known for it ...

HP-UX HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on Unix System V (initially System III) and first released in 1984. Current versions support HPE Integrity Ser ...

, IBM AIX, NeXTSTEP, Motorola 88000,

OpenVMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Ope ...

on VAX and DEC Alpha systems, DEC ULTRIX, and others. Bundles of SoftPC with Windows ( 3.x, 95, 98) were called SoftWindows, although it was possible to install Windows into the basic SoftPC environment along with some special utilities provided by Insignia to achieve the same effect. The introduction of Windows and applications running in that environment, as opposed to DOS, changed the underlying conditions for emulators, and Insignia's SoftWindows product was described, in comparison to SoftPC, as "a complete redesign, mandated by the size and complexity of Windows programs". The execution characteristics, described as "narrow and deep" in DOS applications, were instead "broad and shallow" in Windows applications, making it more difficult to identify sections of code for translation to the native architecture of the computer running the emulator. Insignia entered into a development agreement with Microsoft giving the company access to Windows source code. This agreement covered the product then known as Windows 4 as well as Windows NT, on which Microsoft was seeking to support compatibility for Intel architecture binaries on RISC architecture systems. When Microsoft released Windows NT it included a subsystem ("WOW" - Windows on Windows, later NTVDM) for running virtualized

16-bit 16-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 16-bit microprocessors. A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two mos ...

Windows (x86) programs. However, they had also made changes to Windows to allow it to run on alternative processors (

Alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whic ...

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

), and for these an emulation layer was needed for programs compiled for Intel processors. Customized versions of Insignia's core emulation system were produced to this end, but the alternative NT architectures never became widely used. Beginning in 1996, Insignia commanded the niche for this product area, but it soon faced heavy competition from Connectix with their Virtual PC product. Insignia sold the product line to

FWB Software FWB may refer to: ;Locations * Branson West Airport, in Missouri, United States * Fort Walton Beach, Florida, a city in the United States * Wiesbaden-Biebrich station, in Germany ;Organizations * Feinwerkbau, a German firearm manufacturer * Filmma ...

in October 1999 in order to focus on supplying implementations of Java for the mobile device market. FWB continued to sell SoftWindows until March 2001. FWB Software also marketed a separate version of the software that did not include a bundled copy of Windows, called RealPC, until 2003. Unlike most emulators, the SoftWindows product used recompiled Windows components to improve performance in most business applications, providing almost native performance (but this meant that, unlike SoftPC, SoftWindows was not upgradable).InfoWorld Article on SoftWindows
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References

{{Reflist IRIX software NeXTSTEP software Solaris software OpenVMS software X86 emulators

See also

References