SoftPC is a software emulator of

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

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 Intergraph Corporation was an American software development and services company, which now forms part of Hexagon AB. It provides enterprise engineering and geospatially powered software to businesses, governments, and organizations around the w ...

whose workstation had a proprietary processor architecture. Available originally on

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

workstations to run

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

, the software was ported to the

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

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 Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded "M ...

, supported platforms included

SGI IRIX IRIX ( ) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS architecture, MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD extension ...

, Sun Solaris,

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 AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive, pronounced , "ay-eye-ex") is a series of Proprietary software, proprietary Unix operating systems developed and sold by IBM for several of its computer platforms. Background Originally released for the ...

NeXTSTEP NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT Computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its range of proprieta ...

Motorola 88000 The 88000 (m88k for short) is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Motorola during the 1980s. The MC88100 arrived on the market in 1988, some two years after the competing SPARC and MIPS. Due to the late start and extensive delays re ...

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 ...

VAX VAX (an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The VA ...

and

DEC Alpha Alpha (original name Alpha AXP) is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Alpha was designed to replace 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computers ...

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 Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems sc ...

it included a subsystem ("WOW" -

Windows on Windows In computing, Windows on Windows (commonly referred to as WOW), was a compatibility layer of 32-bit versions of the Windows NT family of operating systems since 1993 with the release of Windows NT 3.1, which extends NTVDM to provide limited supp ...

, later

NTVDM Virtual DOS machines (VDM) refer to a technology that allows running 16-bit/32-bit DOS and 16-bit Windows programs when there is already another operating system running and controlling the hardware. Overview Virtual DOS machines can operate ei ...

) 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 Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

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 Connectix Corporation was a software and hardware company, noted for having released innovative products that were either made obsolete as Apple Computer incorporated the ideas into system software, or were sold to other companies once they became ...

with their

Virtual PC Windows Virtual PC (successor to Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, and Connectix Virtual PC) is a virtualization program for Microsoft Windows. In July 2006, Microsoft released the Windows version free of charge. In August ...

product. Insignia sold the product line to FWB Software in October 1999 in order to focus on supplying implementations of

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

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