West German graphics system developer SPEA Software AG of Starnberg, Munich has started up its international operations with the simultaneous opening of offices in the US in Boston, and in the UK in Leicester. Funded by a combination of West German government and venture capital funding, the company manufactures Panther add-on boards for MS-DOS micros under Unix V.3, which are based on the Intergraph Clipper and are aimed specifically at the processor-intensive graphics marketplace, and sold in conjunction with its Graphiti Series graphics boards. Performance of around 8 MIPS or 2.6 Megaflops is claimed for an 80386 machine fitted with the Panther, which costs UKP5,000 in the UK. The graphics board costs UKP2,000 and provide up to 1,280 by 1,024 resolution, non-interlaced, with 2Mb Video RAM and 256 colours from a palette of 16.7m. Selling OEM and to system houses, SPEA says it has so far sold mostly complete workstations, dubbed Personal Mainframes, but says it expects board sales to be the major focus in the long run. The company has no plans to market its NatSemi 32000-based Tiger board outside Germany.
