Microsoft OS changes in the past

[isshinryu88]

I was looking at the Palm site and found a section on why one should pick Palms over PPCs. It said that at some point MS decided to change their OS so that it would only support ARM processors, or something like that. They said that this resulted in a lot of useless software.

Is this really what happened? When did this happen and was it really that bad?

[Tom61]

When PocketPC 2002 was released it only supported one processor type, Arm. PocketPC 2000 and previous versions of WindowsCE supported 3; Arm, Mips, and SH3. Mips was the dominate format, with SH3 second, until Compaq released the iPaq. The iPaq made such a big splash with it's 206MHz Arm processor, compared with the Mips processors which were typically clocked at 100-125MHz, that it became dominate, and alot of new new software was made exclusively for it.

Anyways, MS decided that having only one processor type to support would be a good idea, and killed off it's support of other processors in PPC 2002. It shouldn't have made much of a problem, as most every sofware out then could be compiled in Arm format without trouble. However, not all developers of for pay software thought that you should have more than one version of the compile type. This meant that for some software you had to pay for another license for your new hand held.

In other words, since you went from a handheld with one processor type to another, you had to buy some software you already owned for the previous hand held. As I mentioned earlier, Mips was the dominate processor before then.

It caused some turmoil, but not too bad. As far as it affecting you now, it shouldn't too much.

[JakeRich]

One other factor was that most of the non - ARM PDAs did not have flashable ROMs, so the fact that the new OS was only for ARM processors didn't matter at all. What did matter was that the flow of new software for the other processors died out. However, I used a MIPS PDA quite happily until I got my Axim.