The History of Microsoft Windows CE - Windows CE 1.0xWith the new development project underway, and the lessons of the past under their belts. The Pegasus team started working on a completely new system. Out of the WinPad project Pegasus took the overall aspirations brought by the hardware design, and completely abandoning the code in favour of the newer and far superior 32-bit technologies that Microsoft were developing elsewhere. Testing of the Pegasus groups output began in early 1995, under the project code name of Windows Pegasus. Pegasus was to be used on the new lines of mobile device running on specially designed hardware. Crucially the hardware requirements would be very strict. OEM's had to comply with the established guidelines. This meant that special low power hardware was mandatory. Even with 32-bit Processors these demands solved the Battery problems experienced with WinPad. Microsoft created a reference platform specification, which the Pegasus group saw to be the ideal format for the new device. This specification was sent to the seven hardware partners signed up to produce the hardware for the new Windows operating system. The Pegasus Reference Platform dictated that all devices must be:
Pegasus was also to be considerably more advanced then even consumer versions of Windows that succeeded it. Pegasus was to be a multifunction, multi-region device. To do this Microsoft needed to ensure that it had the power to expand and adapt to different markets. 21 months after the Pegasus Group was founded, in September 1996. 6 OEM developers (Casio were the first to begin consultation on the project, followed by Compaq, HP, LG Electronics (for Hitachi), NEC, and Philips) had been signed up - based on the merits of the work carried out up to the fourth Beta release - to create devices based around the Pegasus system and the newly christened Windows CE 1.0 was Released To Manufacturing (RTM). Windows CE 1.0In November 1996 Handheld PC's (H/PC) rapidly started entering production. With only the NEC MobilePro 200 and the Casio A-10 readily available at the time of launch, the bulk of devices such as the hp 300LX series and the Velo 1 range of H/PC's appeared in early to mid 1997. Marking what would be the start of a recurring trend, Hewlett Packard elected to buck the established restrictions and pushed for a modified hardware specification. hp felt that releasing a Windows CE device with a smaller device and screen footprint than their existing MS-DOS based 'LX' PDA range would be detrimental, proving especially problematic in luring the large numbers of existing LX users into the Windows CE marketplace. The 640x240 or 'HVGA' screen specification proved to be the winning formula for hp. Once again electing to call upon their own experience, rather than Microsoft 'PC Companion' initiative. Hp marketed the 300LX to the consumer market as their so named 'Palmtop PC'. The moved pushed them out in front of the competition and into a long standing relationship as the standard bearer of what a true Handheld PC was meant to be. Windows CE 1.01Windows CE 1.01 (aka 1.0a) was an incremental update and localisation release for the PDA hungry Japanese market.
Windows CE 1.0 was plagued with interpretability problems. In the October of 1996, just weeks before the first Windows CE 1.0 devices hit the market place, Microsoft refreshed its flagship Office suite. The new Office 97 included Outlook, a new, unified, Personal Information Management application designed to rival the dominant Lotus releases. When the first devices shipped only weeks later, the H/PC Explorer 1.0 sync client had not been modified to address the new API format for Outlook, and so could offer synchronisation only with the existing Schedule+ personal scheduler application found in Office 95. Users had to wait until the March of 1997 until they received the H/PC Explorer 1.1 release, which provided support for Outlook, hindering the adoption of both Outlook and the H/PC. Microsoft's resolute attempt to intertwine the H/PC with Outlook as an attempt to encourage adoption undoubtedly did more damage to the release of both product lines than good. Where Microsoft left off, inexorably developer ingenuity was to follow, and by March 1997, Pumatech had readied its own sync client for the 1.0 release, which included, amongst others, IBM Lotus Organiser synchronisation support. Despite the release of an Emulation SDK in the Windows CE Platform Toolkit's, which was designed to tempt developers to take up the challenge of programming for the H/PC, without the hardware overheads. The development community was slow to pick up on the tools. Requiring the expensive Visual Studio 97 Visual Basic 5 or Visual C++ 5 Professional, and then additional Windows CE modules to be purchased on top of that, efforts by Microsoft to push the platform received a lukewarm response. Events and circumstances had conspired to see the Windows CE 1.0 release occur in a less than idea environment, and for this the first release of Microsoft's Windows CE operating system would be a short lived one. Windows CE 1.0x Release HistoryThere were two incarnations of Windows CE 1.
Windows CE 1's Host PC Synchronisation software, Handheld PC (H/PC) Explorer was developed also under the codename Pegasus. H/PC Explorer was originally named Pegasus Manager during the beta process, but was renamed once the term Handheld PC had been adopted for marketing purposes.
Now-a-days finding software, information and other such Windows CE 1 related web sites is very hard to do. The official Microsoft Web site doesn't seem to recognise the existence of any mobile device operating system before that of CE 2.10. With no warranties left, and the manufacturers who sold us their CE 1 products, full of promise now telling us their is nothing that they can do to help it falls to the Internet community to keep the vision of CE 1 alive. Not to let it die and become lost in the confides of time like Win NT 3.1 was. There is still life left CE 1 Windows CE 1.0 Screenshots | Windows CE 1.01 Screenshots | Handheld PC Device List
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