Microsoft at Work

The fortunes of Windows Printing Technology would turn a year later as Lexmark introduced their WinWriter series: "With the Microsoft Windows Printing System Built In!" Speaking of the Lexmark WinWriter series, this whole printing thing is kind of a tangent. Back to the course: MAW was not just Windows on a fax machine, not just the Windows Printing System, but an integrated system of Windows on a fax machine, the Windows Printing System, a generalized network protocol, and apparently a page description language. Microsoft envisioned Windows on a phone, bringing desk phones into the same architecture, or environment, or whatever. A television commercial has been preserved, giving us a small window into the Windows on a Fax Machine experience. That would be WinPad, curiously not mentioned at all in the MAW Wikipedia article, but instead in the Windows CE article, as a precursor to CE. Windows CE gets a lot more affection than MAW, and so we know quite a bit more about WinPad. It was an early attempt at an operating system for a touchscreen mobile device, one that, in classic Microsoft fashion, competed internally with another project to build an operating system for a touchscreen mobile device and died out along with the rest of MAW. It was based on 16-bit Windows 3.1, using a stripped-down UI layer that resembled Windows 95. Do you know what did? Windows CE. Is it possible? Do you think? Is Windows CE a derivative of Windows for Fax Machines? From the ashes of WinPad and the similarly failed Pegasus, some of the same people started work on a brand new project, Pulsar, which would become Windows CE. MAW didn't survive the '90s. Well, some things are like that.