A Day in the Life of Microsoft’s Winpad

I read the news today oh boy About an unlucky machine that failed the grade And though the news was rather sad Well I just had to laugh I saw the photograph

Original words and music to “A Day in the Life” by Lennon and McCartney, Copyright ©1967 Northern Song Limited

Many PDA hardware developers breathed a collective sigh of relief upon learning that Microsoft has delayed its much-ballyhooed Winpad operating system. While stopping short of admitting defeat, Microsoft has withdrawn its support for third-party developers.

Publicly, Microsoft remains committed to the concept of a handheld PDA market based in some fashion around its monumentally successful Windows operating system. However, the regrouping has likely forced any introduction into 1996 at the earliest.

According to sources, Microsoft was simply unable to design a system that manufacturers could build and sell at the $500 target. A significant deviation from this price would cause a Winpad-based device to venture uncomfortably close to the price of low-end, full-featured notebook computers.

Designers reportedly couldn’t find a reasonable way to shrink the Winpad system to fit in a one megabyte space. Microsoft also experienced problems with its hardware partners, most notably with the abdication of VLSI as the chip producer for Winpad, and Compaq Computer Corp’s midstream change of course.

Not all the news is bad, however. Windows95, Microsoft’s replacement for Windows 3.1 (previously code-named Chicago) will include full support for pen input as part of the base operating system. Windows95 will also include a trainable handwriting recognizer and enhanced support for annotations including ink capabilities for OLE 2.0-compatible applications.

Microsoft Corporation
David Britton
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-6399
(206) 936-1530
(206) 936-2491 (fax)
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