Wait, it’s still alive???
We still use that shit at work on our barcode scanners
Though I’m not sure if it’s still technically “Windows ce” or Windows mobile
Used by Crestron Electronics for their 3-Series products. Not all are discontinued…
This was my immediate though lol. I’m still running some 3 series in my house. CP3 for testing and a PMC3 in my living room.
Voting machines …
How could even Microsoft release a product named WinCE? I’ve marveled at it for decades.
We’re talking about the company that once released a utility called the Critical Update Notification Tool (then quickly changed “Tool” to “Utility” when people started laughing). Abbreviations were never their strength.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Update#Critical_Update_Notification_Utility
Some of that has to be engineers taking the piss. We are all the same kind of geek-ass bastard, and we love this kind of stupid thing.
IIRC, IBM’s PowerPC chips had some of their instructions renamed in 1994. There were some very plausible motives given for changing how mnemonics worked. Mentioning flag names was boilerplate, abbreviating “ex-” words as X was too American, that sort of thing. So officially, there’s no particular reason the Enforce In-order Execution of Input / Output command is EIEIO.
I had somehow missed that one. Thanks for giving me something else to laugh about.
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I never noticed that for years. Now I can’t unread that word anymore. Thanks.
Glad I could help. :-)
On a related note, I’m still annoyed microsoft bungled the windows phone and didn’t do more to support app developers. Arguably better than osx and certainly android at the time.
Loved my Windows Phones, I had three of them, and even released an app. I thought the app support, from a technical standpoint, was really good insofar as I could release the same app and have it run perfectly on phones, tablets and desktops. The issue I had with Windows Phones was how they just got steadily worse instead of better. They lost their uniqueness and became closer to Android clones with each iteration, and it was clear Microsoft weren’t fully behind the platform long before the app developers began to leave. Real shame.
They were doomed the moment they needed “app developers.”
Nobody gives a shit about Windows. Nobody. Not one soul. It’s only exciting when it betrays you. Windows persists entirely because it runs the software everyone already has. Hell, I’m in Linux, and I’m still running Windows software, right now.
Would running arbitrary desktop applications on a phone be ridiculous? Yep. But no more ridiculous than making desktop Windows work like a fucking tablet. And now a decade later, high-end phones outclass my laptop from that era. x86 was even an option! Android/x86 was A Thing for a hot minute, and Intel had that little SOC that’d fit in a Game Boy cartridge. Would it run well, or run Windows well, or run Windows programs well? Nope. But it’d do a battery-sucking job of running all the dumb shit people wanted to do with their magical pocket computers.
The ultimate irony is that ARM devices can run any old Windows program now. User-mode emulators like Box86 pair with translators like Wine to fake both the hardware and software of a Windows PC. Microsoft could’ve done that shit, themselves, and pushed some .NET phone where the backend doesn’t matter. Like Android was fucking supposed to.
time to upgrade my dremacast to 11
I remember in 2013 building software for HMIs running WinCE and back then, it was horribly outdated and a trudge to work on. I can’t imagine how bad it would be today.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Devices like the NEC MobilePro 200, Casio (Cassiopeia) A-10, and HP 300LX started appearing in late 1996 and early 1997, with tiny keyboards, more-landscape-than-landscape displays, and, by modern standards, an impressive number of ports.
By the time Ars Technica started mentioning Windows CE in 2003, it was well on its way to becoming Microsoft’s “Sure, we have an OS for that” solution.
It was the embedded “Windows CE for Smart Displays” OS for a ViewSonic airpanel V150p, which let you remotely control a desktop from something that you might, at an angle, call a tablet.
It was modified with “Windows XP extensions” to power a $250 AMD “Personal Internet Communicator” meant for “emerging markets” in 2004.
Still, in mid-2005, Windows CE was installed in nearly half the PDAs sold, with most of its share having been clawed out of Palm’s clutches.
Later that year, Palm announced that its newest device, the Treo 650, was running Windows Mobile.
The original article contains 380 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
