The History of Windows CE: 1. Pegasus

Microsoft was always very inventive in finding good code names for it's products.
At the beginning of Windows CE code names were borrowed from Greek mythology, followed by forest species and lately Whiskies.
Damian persuaded me to write about the early Windows CE because I started Windows CE development with these ancient versions during the last century. I felt very old when he told me this ;-)

If you want to read a good history of Windows CE have a look at this: http://www.hpcfactor.com/support/windowsce/

Okay, let's talk about the first version, code name Microsoft Pegasus. I must emphasize it was before my time with Windows CE.
Pegasus didn't have a PlatformBuilder-like development kit.
It was just for Handheld PC's from a couple of vendors. You couldn't build your own version of the OS.

But in those days a number of decicions were where made which turned out to be still valid today:
* Windows like system with EXEs and DLLs and a PC compatiple PE header
* Strict 32 bit architecture, no 16 bit relics
* Strict Unicode support
* Many other basic things ...

And today we were reminded of the old Pegasus project in our daily work:
Debug zones on host PC can be set with this registry settings:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Pegasus\Zones
Here you can add a DWORD value with the name of your registered Debug Zone.
The value will be set to your dpCurSettings.ulZoneMask during start-up.
But did you know it is also possible to set Debug Zone values on the target registry directly?
Just add the DWORD values to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\DebugZones.

Stay tuned for my next post on version 2, code name Alder.

Tschüß Holger