Windows CE, Microsoft’s stunted middle child, reaches end of support at 26 years
Windows CE, Microsoft’s stunted middle child, reaches end of support at 26 years
From netbooks and PDAs to ATMs, voting kiosks, and ungainly presidential phones.
Wait, it’s still alive???
I'm not sure about ATMs, they often ran OS/2.
Windows CE often ran media centres or UI panels in things like John Deere tractors or the Fiat 500.
It was also the OS that ran the Dreamcasts UI.
Or XP Embedded.
From my own experience, I've also seen it on price checkers (Kmart Australia), navigation devices (Navman GPS units) and older Clarion head units.
It was heavily used on barcode scanning devices. I had my first few programming jobs using them.
I still see some of them around.
Good riddance!!
Barcode scanners is what popped into my head reading the title.
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.
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
Voting machines ...
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.
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.
To quote Epic Rap Battles of History, "Why'd you name your company after your dick?"
I never noticed that for years. Now I can’t unread that word anymore. Thanks.
Glad I could help. :-)
time to upgrade my dremacast to 11
Would be pretty funny to use the Xbox app on Windows 10/11 running on a Sega Dreamcast. Well, I also put Android on my Nintendo Switch and installed the Xbox app, purely for fun.
In all seriousness, it supports 10/100 ethernet and has negligible DRM, so it really should be capable of remote play. Unfortunately the promise of cloud mainframe nonsense is always betrayed by limiting it to very recent devices that can do just fine locally.
The number of things Microsoft turned to shit is impressive.
Every big corporation turns everything to shit because being good costs too much.
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!
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.
Windows ce looks like an interesting operating system being ran on almost anything I'm pretty sure they ran this on some cad infotainment systems
You need Visual Studio 2008 to development for it, which was also made impossible to get thanks to MS. 😭
I had not yet begun to live....
