Apparently, the company didn't like the fact that multiple teams were focusing on the same thing in different ways, and reorganized them into one team under Senior VP Brad Silverberg. Thus, the "Pegasus" project was born. Frustrations grew from the slowness of the object-oriented OS team to respond to the needs of the Pegasus team, and a new operating system began to develop behind closed doors under the guidance of Thomas Fenwick, one that would be fast, flexible, and modular. This was the birth of Windows CE 1.0.

Windows CE 1.0: Little. Greyscale. Different.
When most people look at a CE device, they assume it's running Windows 95, which is exactly what UI shell lead developer Tony Kitowicz wanted. For the new platform to be accepted, it needed to be easy to use and immediately recognizable -- and considering the market penetration of Windows 95, that was clearly a good idea.

To understand how Windows CE is so different from any other Microsoft OS, let's consider some of the issues inherent with Windows 95 (and by extension, Windows 98). Over the next few paragraphs, I'm going to share my perspectives on Windows 95 and 98. You should be aware that these are my personal perspectives and like with all computer experiences, your mileage may vary.

First, it can be a tad unstable; my machine crashes multiple times a day, and I've heard other folks complain of their machines locking up or crashing. I believe the primary reason for this was the painful lengths Microsoft needed to go to in order to provide backwards compatibility with 16-bit applications and older hardware. This was done to avoid alienating consumers who didn't want to buy new hardware and software for the new OS, but I often wonder which is more frustrating: dishing out a few hundred bucks for new hardware or having your computer crash regularly?

For any given hardware product, there are at least a dozen vendors making slightly different versions, and Microsoft has to try to support them all. It's been jokingly said that Windows 95/98 is a 32-bit patch for a 16-bit shell built over an 8-bit operating system -- and there's some truth to this, in the sense that ongoing backward compatibility was demanded by users. [Let's be clear however, that Windows 98 is a substantially more robust product than Windows 95 and is quite suitable for daily work by millions. -- DG]

NT is far more stable, but until NT 5.0 (a.k.a. Windows 2000) makes its debut, I won't move over -- too many programs and drivers that I need aren't available for NT 4.0.

The second problem with Windows 95/98 is speed. For certain applications, my 400mhz PII seems as fast under Windows 98 as my original 33mhx 486SX machine was at running Windows 3.1. As our computer systems get faster, we demand more from our operating systems. This requires our operating systems to work much harder to do the same types of tasks -- sometimes it almost seems like we're simply breaking even. [Yeah, but again, to be fair, you couldn't play Quake II or Tribes in full 800x600 mode, 24-bits deep, with dynamic 3D rendering and lighting effects on a 33mhz 486! -- DG]