LONDON (05/02/2000) - Microsoft Corp. today announced that four new original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will build and distribute Windows-powered smart cards.
Aladdin Knowledge Systems Ltd., California Plastics Inc., ICT Technologies and Eastgate Smartron Pte. Ltd. are the most recent companies to license Windows for Smart Cards, Microsoft said in a statement.
Cards made with the software, which Microsoft announced six months ago, contain an 8-bit microprocessor and can hold 16K bytes of data, so that they can not only store data but run applications.
Microsoft also announced that there are now over 100 independent software vendors (ISVs) developing software for the Windows-powered cards, and more than 35,000 smart card toolkits have been sold through retail channels and mailings targeted at developers.
The announcements were made today at the CardTech/SecurTech conference in Miami Beach, Florida, where development tool company Swiftcard Technology Inc. also announced that it is developing a C compiler for the platform, allowing programmers to write programs in C for the card.
Microsoft, in Redmond, Washington, is at +1-425-882-8080, or at http://www.microsoft.com/.