REDMOND, Wash. -- Microsoft Corp. is apparently poised to release CardBus software for Windows 95, industry sources said. The move gives added impetus to the robust, 32-bit answer to PC-card congestion, just as the first CardBus products begin showing up on the market.

"I've seen a demo and it looks good," said Bill Lempesis, chief executive officer of the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA). "I don't think there's been any tremendous rush [by Microsoft] to get it out. CardBus produ cts are just now becoming available."

Microsoft declined to comment on the issue, but sources said the company's CardBus software will begin appearing in PCs shipped beginning in a month or two. Previously, CardBus-enabling Card and Socket Services software has been supplied by third-party vendors such as SystemSoft Corp. and Phoenix Technologies Ltd., both based in Natick, Mass.

At the same time, SystemSoft and Phoenix are attempting to stay ahead of the Microsoft curve by offering Card and Socket Services software for Windows NT. The PhoenixCard Executive software suite supports CardBus and its kissing cousin, Zoom Video, in NT 4.0. The offering, tailored to portable systems, includes the company's NoteBIOS, PowerPanel 2.0 and BatteryScope 2.0. SystemSoft, which to date has dominated the PC-card software market, is offering a broad range of its PC-card and power-management software for Windows NT 4.0 users, too.

As the vanguard products finally begin to hit the marketplace, the future of Yenta, the CardBus ad hoc standards-setting committee, is in doubt. "There's still a need for Yenta," said its chairman, John McGrath, a technical marketing engineer at Intel Corp.'s Hillsboro, Ore., development lab, "and we're proposing that [Yenta] be turned over to the PCMCIA. I'm going to wrap up Yenta pretty soon. Yenta [as a separate body] will just fade away."

Lempesis said the PCMCIA is likely to vote in favor of taking over the operation of Yenta at its next meeting. From its start two years ago, Yenta‹a Yiddish term for a "meddlesome old woman"‹was planned to self-destruct after CardBus standards were in place. Initially the group expected to attract just a handful of members, but the roster grew to 50 as the technical challenges of putting the 32-bit, 128-Mbyte CardBus on Type II PC cards grew.

Meanwhile, the debate over whether to use CardBus or the Zoom Video spec devised by Cirrus Logic Corp. (Fremont, Calif.) for low-cost video application s appears to have been settled, more or less by default. The new controllers for CardBus also contain Zoom-Video capability.

"This was a case of the world saying, 'you have to have Zoom Video whether it makes sense or not,' " said Intel's McGrath. "Zoom Video is fine for the slow stuff, but when the bandwidth starts to build you're going to need CardBus. As resolution of graphics gets higher, the pictures get smaller, so there will be a big future for CardBus."

In videoconferencing, for instance, the first CardBus PC card on the market‹from Toshiba's Computer Systems Division‹offers full-motion video display of remote and local users, and shows multiple users on a single call. On the other hand, a Zoom- Video card offered by Texas Instruments Inc. (Dallas) delivers MPEG digital video in a full-screen broadcast on TI's Extensa 900 laptop computer.

The CardBus beachhead wasn't established without casualties. Two pioneering PC-card and CardBus companies‹Databo ok Inc. and National Semiconductor Corp.‹have withdrawn from the CardBus battlefield.

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