Companies that deal in application software for electrical engineers found their territory expanding during the past year. The availability of highly capable hardware, as well as the introduction of the operating system, Windows NT, opened up the market to many new platforms. In addition, users are demanding software that can cope with new tasks. Everywhere, vendors say, one of the principal pressures is the need to network engineers into corporate data, so that engineering design data may be shared with manufacturing, reliability calculations can flow from design work, and so forth. This paper discusses Windows NT, how 'old software' is being updated to do more tasks, how DSP and RF tools are are being combined to form wireless systems and how suppliers are taking on many platforms. >