The Mysterious Dutch Railways HP Jornada 680e

[@NCommander]

So, past me, it was German, not French ... >.

[@juansanchezdominguez7885]

I also am a railway enthusiast and I happen to be subscribed to a NS train driver channel. I put the link on one of his videos to see if the can add something to all the stuff you said. The channel is kzbin.info/door/NnxhT5O9e43QBctJFzpDjA

[@ant64b]

The future suuuuucks!

[@user-lv6rn9cf8m]

Swedish keyboard though A German one would have Ü where the Å is.

[@leap123_]

Gutentag! I'm from France

[@sp_arc]

@@leap123_ it's "Guten Tag!" ;)

[@framebuffers]

You know a content creator knows their stuff when you set up an Exchange server on an old NT machine to make it even more authentic. Man the effort put is just incredible! Absolutely amazing work as always!

[@systemchris]

And setting up exchange is never straight forward, even 25 years later

[@moow950]

I remember travelling with the train in The Netherlands and the conductor was using this device to lookup the train time schedule / delays / ticket prices etc.

[@ZiggyTheHamster]

I used to develop software for enterprises using similar Windows CE devices (5/6 though). Vendors would do special covers for big customers. One I can think of is Home Depot. Motorola did a run of like 500 covers in their corporate branding just as a sales tool. The covers had a dual purpose though - they also kept the users out of the expansion slots. End users were expected to swap batteries and that’s all, so giving them access to the SD slot (on our devices) was not great because it would mean they could make the device do something unintended while being curious. We also had flashed them so they wouldn’t boot up into the desktop. The way CE devices work is that everything is stored in RAM - the 2032 keeps it alive while you swap batteries. You have to use the external storage for anything permanent, or flash a custom read only OS to the small internal flash. So a hard reset on these deletes everything if you didn’t persist it. That’s also why you have the programs vs storage slider in the settings. Both go to RAM. If you weren’t storing anything to the internal storage, you’d max out the setting for programs. On our devices, the internal flash had so little space that our applications didn’t fit, so we ended up having to make a loader that on cold boot would install the applications to RAM from the SD card, and then would boot into the applications, which stored their data on the SD card. It meant testing was fast because you’d just drop a new CAB on the SD card and hard reset. We did keep the desktop around, because managers would sometimes feel they needed to have access to settings, but you’d have to use a hidden button and a password to exit.

[@WhatALoadOfTosca]

As to the "No CF slot", could they possible have had a preinstalled CF card inserted with proprietary software on it that they didn't want removed? Would make sense as to stop access to the slot to stop people removing a card.

[@ctcards2636]

This is my thought on it as well.

[@JasonPullara]

The fact that you got IrDA to work at all earned you a thumbs up.

[@NCommander]

I actually went out of my way getting IrDA to work having to do so many hoops to get there.

[@GeorgeTsiros]

@@NCommander next step, get it to talk to an hp48 also, i'm only halfway through the video, but you could possibly, maybe, manage to get some earlier linux in there. (recent ones have dropped support for 386s and 486s i think) edit: disregard that, this has a superH or something

[@ctcards2636]

I use it everyday with both my main units a HP 360LX and a Casio A-11+. And i shall continue to use it with my 680e and my A-20. It works for me for what i do. :-) Less cables around. Biggest files are a few mb max it seems. (shrugs).

[@cheaplife2320]

the NS used a customised version to use for Rail Conductors , these were in use until 2003 when they were replaced for the Hp iPaq h4350 NS ordered 10.000 units so they had a order large enough shipment of units for customisation

[@Dark_Horse_Productions23]

And i worked for a company called Issue Information Technology which was involved to deliver them to the Railroad company after config them

[@prescan7000]

I think I have seen these at Dutch Railways HQ last year. Will point some ex-colleges to this video!

[@ruadeil_zabelin]

12:00 On top of that, the dutch typically don't care if it is in english. Many would happily work with a full english system and not be bothered by it. It is almost a second language to most.

[@kbhasi]

(11:45) My theories: They may have used the IrDA or serial connection to load on a custom application (or a few) that would've had a UI in Dutch and/or other languages, and wouldn't have burnt it into the ROM in order to allow them to update it/them when needed. They also could've set one of the applications to automatically launch on Windows CE start-up, so the employee would likely have only seen the Windows CE desktop in English for 1 or 2 seconds before launching into custom software that would've been in Dutch, that could've showed the date, time, and battery level on its own, and provide links to other custom applications. The last theory stemmed from me seeing a karaoke machine as a child, back in roughly 2006 or so. That ran Windows 98 SE in Simplified Chinese, and so the desktop would load in Chinese before automatically launching into the karaoke software in English. It had a PC monitor and a larger TV, and that larger TV didn't turn on until a song was selected, leading me to suspect that it was playing through a custom device or LaserDisc player instead of using Windows 98 SE multi-monitor functionality.

[@Karpour]

The NS Railpocket devices are very mysterious, there's so little info on the internet about them, and NS used many different devices over the years. I saw these Jornadas for sale every now and then, but somehow suspected that it would come with some software on a permanently installed CF card. There's also some NS Railpocket PCMCIA cards on sale, and I think they either contain just the rail schedules, or they might even be receivers for proprietary RF broadcasts at train stations updating the train schedule. Considering how many people in the Netherlands are into trains, I'm surprised that there isn't a site dedicated to these devices. Also, please consider posting about your findings on HPCFactor, there might be some other people who know about this :)

[@NCommander]

I didn't find the railpocket devices *at all* when I was searching into them, although I suspect most of that information is in Dutch. I considered that the railpocket software would have been on the internal CF slot, but I question if someone would have known to remove the screws, pop the card out, then put it back together. (you CAN use a CF card in the exposed PCMCIA slot on the side with an adapter, that works just fine).

[@JasperJanssen]

@@NCommander NS might have wanted to remove the proprietary software before they resold the devices, and they would definitely have known that it was there.

[@JeroenHeij]

My dad used to use 1 of these as a conducteur (Trainmanager) for NS. The PCMCIA cards on the Railpocket where used for storing the personal data of the user, like the workschedule he or she had and wich trains in that shift and if I remeber correctly also to record written tickets (uitstel van betaling). These cards where updated each shift on the station in a specific computer. I just recentely threw away the user manual of this device.

[@ctcards2636]

Yeah HPC Factor is the best ! :-)

[@porklaser]

We had a large number of Jornada palmtops and subnotebooks at the place I used to work in the early 2000s. There was a lot of early buy in because they were very portable and light and the sync-to-pc method of accessing your documents was already the accepted method of getting your data portable due to the palm/handhelds craze. All of your office documents worked great! Though it was not long after real laptops started to catch up . They got smaller and lighter and cheaper, diminishing the unique advantages of the CE devices. Documents became less compatible with newer versions of desktop office, and syncing became less convenient than just throwing your files on regular media (Floppy, CD, etc)

[@NCommander]

A lot of the failure of the CE family is somewhere mid 2003-2004, Microsoft stopped giving a damn. eVC was basedon Visual Studio 4-ish until 2005, and even then, the toolchain was basically unmodified.

[@NJRoadfan]

@@NCommander I assume the .NET Compact Framework replaced it by then. I know VS.NET 2003 had support for it. MS's push for .NET landed up causing their dev tools to stagnate and many stuck with VS6 well past its shelf life.

[@NCommander]

@@NJRoadfan CE development was integrated by VS2005, but the problem was the actual toolchain basically was unchanged. There's a lot of problems w/ remote debugging, the emulator is irritating to use, and the compiler will spite you just for the hell of it.

[@TheSimoc]

@@NCommander It was the time when Microsoft stopped giving a damn about anything.

[@RickardAnderssonHbg]

My voice is my passport... Oh, that brings back memories. Sneakers is one of my favorite movies.

[@jayerjavec]

Oh, she worked hard for that word.

[@Vostok7]

I had too scroll too far down for someone to catch the Sneakers reference. I adored that movie as a kid and it’s probably a big reason I’m a tech obsessed adult.

[@Thiesi]

Oh my God - I remember drooling over the Jornada back in the day! Thanks for making this video! Much appreciated!

[@NCommander]

Yeah, the Jornada stuck with me over 20+ years until I finally got one. It's actually not that great of a handheld because it's somewhat awkward to use, but I'm still in awe of it.

[@fskjdhsjdas]

Interesting Video, Bombardier Transportation in the UK. Still use Jornada 720's relying on a Specific Application to send Data through the IrdA to update onboard Train Systems. Over the years we've had to resort to purchasing from eBay to help Maintain the trains.

[@NCommander]

Doesn't surprise me in the slightest. ZIP disks are still regularly used in avaition, and there aren't too many devices with a form factor like the Jornada which also have IrDA and such.

[@gentuxable]

Some German ICE high speed trains use 3.5 inch floppy disks to populate the seat reservation displays.

[@TheSimoc]

@@gentuxable Designed in the time of software professionalism, when seat reservation information file didn't need a single gigabyte ;)

[@gentuxable]

@@TheSimoc sure but also halfway between too modern and too old. Most other trains save for the latest arrivals just have a plastic card holder for that very purpose and more often than not some staff will walk the train anyway and could easily fill them up with reservation cards. :D nowadays you're faster walking the train than finding a diskette drive or a diskette. But it makes no difference as most of the time the reservation system behind it all messed it up before it became a magnetized track on the flexible media anyway.

[@cavejohnson7609]

Fun fact: Windows CE isn't actually on the Dreamcast console... It was loaded from the disc, if the dev wanted to use it. Most didn't.

[@NCommander]

It was intended to be on ROM, and got nixed at the last minute. THe whole thing from design to what actually shipped is a beauiful mess. I've got at least one solid lead on a Katana to go into it.

[@user-nu5ib2ri9o]

The experience of programming for WinCE was OK and actually quite enjoyable due to its novelty. MFC worked, that's all I needed :) Thanks for the video, great stuff as always!

[@NCommander]

It was OK if you weren't familiar with Win32. A lot of it is you get functions with the same names, but slightly differing behaviors, or very strange gaps. Also, you were in a world of suck if you had to interact with anything that expected ASCII or UTF-8, since there were no A functions and I remember the conversion to/from UTF-16 being rocky at best.

[@JAIMOSR1]

Wow!! this is a blast from my past!! I used to work at a UK repair centre for HP Jornada's back in the early 2000's. I remember well repairing 680's in bulk but not 680e's, certinly don't remember having to take off that bottom cover. I do, however, remember those particular keyboards on the 720's and 728's. The ROMs all contained various localisation information. you could swap that, the keyboard and run an EEPROM update to swap your device from native UK to French or German etc. (the EEPROM update would also allow you to install the devices S/N onto the ROM)

[@htmagic]

I loved my Jornada! Back in 2003/2004, I used to have meetings at work and I would take my Jornada and type on it. Later, I would transfer them into Word for the Daily Reports that I used to create. The Jornada was much smaller than a laptop and people wouldn't notice it as much while I typed the meeting minutes. I had a docking station that would charge the Jornada. It also had the serial cable connection so I could sync to a desktop. The PCMCIA cards had extra memory storage and worked like solid state floppies. I also had a Roladex REX and it would sync to the Jornada as well. A few months ago, I saw my Jornada and I plugged it in and turned it on. Still works after all these years. The keyboard was acceptable and I could type fine on it. The docking unit would hold the stylus upright and ready. I may even have a spare desktop docking station kicking around. Very cool video!

[@ctcards2636]

Sell the docking station (if you have an extra?) ;-)

[@tomhekker]

It was used for travel advice on the Dutch railways. All the train staff had one with a application on the CF card with the latest train time tables. It replaced a thick paper manual with all the times in there. The cover is there so people wouldn’t mess with the CF card that was installed by NS.

[@MarshalerOfficial]

Damn, that thumbnail is impressive for a underrated video

[@DavidHembrow]

That was amusing to see. At the end of the 1990s I worked for a UK company making PC104 embedded computers and ported CE to a couple of their boards. This went remarkably smoothly, with most drivers, even video working out of the box with a software only driver, but performance took a useful step up when I wrote improved drivers need on the sample code which let the hardware handle block copy, scrolling windows, bitblt type ops etc. The weird thing about CE was that there was no real security. Everything on CE ran at the same level. I thought this a weird choice for a relatively modern 32 bit os. Any app could stomp over another app's memory, or directly access IO ports. The latter was actually quite handy for our customers because they could more easily port code they already had which was written to directly access unusual PC104 cards without having to write a driver...

[@legerdemain]

13:10 I have those discs floating around somewhere - TigerDirect was shipping out these paper-labelled CD-Rs with the Jornada 680e back in the mid aughts. I might've missed it in the video, but the compactflash and the full-size PCMCIA can be used at the same time with the Dutch Rail tray removed. Unfortunately, the 680's flip down foot is missing on the 680e, so it won't sit flat if you do this.

[@5argetech56]

I know this is way late.. but I have used some peel and stick rubber feet you can get from homedepot! Just stick them next to the original place. Works fantastic.

[@ctcards2636]

This is what i do

[@KRtekTM]

3:58 Just print those missing legs (which liquidified) on 3D printer with flexible filament (98A or something like that) ;-)

To try to have a better word processor and spreadsheet when using Windows CE/Pocket PC, SoftMaker Office was an option back then. SoftMaker still develops their office suite for Linux, macOS, Windows and Android.

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

I'd be willing to wager that the "680e" was custom *JUST* for the railway, and were leased to them. When the lease ended, they went back to HP, who sold them refurbished, with custom ROM board swapped for standard, to resellers like Tiger. I'd be willing to bet that the railway had a custom ROM board with their custom applications loaded on it.

[@NCommander]

It's *possible*, but why not re-install the voice memo buttons if they're going to do that? It's literially removing five screws and slotting parts. People actually talked about buying the buttons as a part from HP and doing so. (I found a one picture of a generic 680e, but given how many threads talked about re-installing the missing buttons, I wasn't confident to say that wasn't the case).

[@JasperJanssen]

I’d be willing to bet that the NS software was on the CF card, and the plastic cradle is mostly there to protect the CF card from being easily extracted. Also I don’t think NS in that era would lease their electronics. Ownership is more likely. Which explains neatly why they didn’t re-convert them to 680: they wouldn’t have the parts. Especially not in the 1000s.

[@sadev101]

weird i have one from a guy who works at railroads here in netherlands and that one does have a docking station

[@barbudoru]

I have a Jornada 510 and a 720 (ARM processor) with the display part and badge from the 680. It has the extended battery which sticks out at a weird angle but still holds a charge all these years later.

[@barbudoru]

Oh, and 5 or 6 years ago a friend of mine started writing fantasy books and got me to edit and proofread them. I edited one of the books in a remote mountain cabin on the Jornada. Another was edited on a Nokia 9500 Communicator, while traveling around Eastern Europe.

[@barbudoru]

One more as I watch the video: my franken720 has a French AZERTY keyboard with AltGr.

[@jirkazima1126]

@@barbudoru Haha - I also have a "HP Franken-ada". It's a combination of 728 (mainboard+RAM), 720 (base chassis) and 690 (keyboard, lid and display). I created this monster by myself and still have it. Being sort of a collector these days, I feel very guilty. However, back then, I didn't care and I wanted the best components in my primary handheld device.

[@barbudoru]

@@jirkazima1126 That's quite a combo, I'm not sure what the advantages were for the specific parts. For what it's worth, I wasn't the butcher on mine, I got it that way. The "hotkeys" to the right the screen don't seem to work and the keyboard is treated like standard qwerty despite the french azerty layout, but everything else seems to work quite well.

[@marksmith9566]

I can see where a government item would not want to allow access to Compact Flash. Just like USB sticks, it is a tempting virus vector.

[@NCommander]

You can insert them through the uncovered PCMICA slot. I considered that they might block the ports for that but it would mean that someone knew to remove the cards before they were sold

[@MMMMMMMMMM857]

The NS conducteur used these things in the past, for looking up info for passengers. (arrival times, when to change trains and on what platform etc.) The reason why they pop up in 2005 is because by that time they where obselete, and because the Dutch like to make money they sold all of them at the same time. (After beeing sucsesfully replaced.)

[@jirkazima1126]

I don't think that I've ever seen a better video showing Windows CE handhelds in action. Regarding the localization: There were two types of keyboards for every model (standard 680, 690, 720...). The English versions had less (but larger) keys. Keyboards intended for many other countries had more keys. For example, systems officially sold in Czech Republic always had the version with more keys (all models), because it would be hard to use the Czech layout on the reduced version. Languages (I assume that this includes Dutch) were often installed using special "overlay" applications that installed localized system files in ROM (keyboard layout, sync functions, UI). Windows CE has a nice feature - if you copy a file into a system directory and overwrite any original system file, the new file version is transparently stored in the RAM storage. If any application accesses the file, the system responds with the new version and not the one in ROM. This trick was used for localization even on many HPC2000 and PocketPC 2003 devices. Modified ROM was presumably used only for languages used in larger countries (German, French...).

[@NCommander]

I actually had to buy DaVinci Resolve Studio to make this video possible for LCD stalibization and advanced color grading, but the state of handheld preservation is kinda depressing. I might tackle Palm in the future, but that's a somewhat thicker wicket to go into.

[@Veso266]

Yey, the video is out BTW: when will you boot Windows 95 remotly using RIPL and NT 4?

[@NCommander]

I need more token ring stuff to do so

[@Veso266]

@@NCommander why TokenRing, doesnt it work on ethernet as well?

[@NCommander]

@@Veso266 It's because I have one machine with a working RPL firmware with Token Ring. I've yet to be able to get an Ethernet card with real RPL firmware.

[@kelownatechkid]

I recommend buying a bulk bag of random plastic/rubberized sticker feet from amazon or another similar retailer. I have done this in the past to help replace them on random things like desktop audio equipment and keyboards.

[@kelownatechkid]

Great video :)

[@kelownatechkid]

Also, you should perform that document test again, and run a diff on the files to see if they were changed significantly in the conversion process. Perhaps even without making any change if possible, to get a pure conversion test.

[@KertaDrake]

Honestly, if you don't care about looks, some dabs of hot glue make great replacements for those rubber feet. Also, I wish they put the IrDA ports on both sides of any device that uses it... not for convenience, I just think it would be hilarious to rig it into a token ring network.

[@bw4593]

Can’t express how much I wanted a Jornada in my teens. Think I may try to pick one up at some point

[@ChrisCookTech]

Fantastic production! Looks like you are getting the hang of Davinci!

[@cocusar]

Wow, amazing that there was one in my country (Argentina) for sale! Sadly that listing price is about 60usd. I wouldn't pay that much for it, even on that condition.

[@sirdespin]

MI PAIS MI PAIS

[@Oxim1nus]

i used them a lot back then, mostly for emulation and music, i will correct you, in fact the rom were flasheable and with the years the community grew a lot patches giving new functionality and stability, i have one of the very old jornadas in working state, monochrome with windows ce 1.0

[@sydneybiscuit]

Hi yes, software engineer here, according to the log file, it appears that the pocket access only allows databases to have 2 indexes, likely due to memory usage. The address book database you imported has more than 2. It appears to have imported correctly, aside from recreating the indexes. Synching changes back to the desktop should work with or without the indexes

[@NCommander]

I actually used the wrong clip with a database that "imported" (cause MSFT's termology is backwards), but couldn't be synced due to missing primary keys. The database I exported was one of the templates shipped in Access 97. Microsoft deleted most of their documentaiton for this stuff, and Pocket JET became SQL Server Compact Embedded which was less picky.

[@sydneybiscuit]

@@NCommander ah very interesting! Fair enough, thank you for the reply, and keep up the amazing content!

[@NCommander]

@@sydneybiscuit to be honest, I spent a good part of my career avoiding Access like the plague, so I kind hid under my desk while filming that :).

[@douglasrogers4675]

I wonder if it started appearing in 2005 because that is when Dutch Railways replaced them and they ended up at auctions or recyclers.

[@NCommander]

That's my working theory. That being said, these might be unsold stock made by HP. Mine never appeared to be used (there was film on the LCD when I got it), and I never found any indication that my model or the tigerdirect ones crossed customs. I did find some European users w/ the same DR 680e, so at least SOME made it there.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Unexpectedly learned that CE had another rename before becoming Mobile. Even in 2005 and 2006, I saw lots of engineers of all stripes in the southern UK carrying handheld devices with CE on to handle their calendar for that day. (Also had the phone book they would consult when they needed to contact the back office.) BT engineers, British Gas engineers (wonder why that’s never called simply BG), etc. I had never seen that pre-XP revamped look on them though, they were definitely running regular CE. I presume they got the calendars loaded up before the work day and they picked them up out of the cradle at the office/depot. I remember certain electricians and telecom engineers who would meticulously mark the calendar task as done the moment they’d finished the work, before actually packing up. I also recall one of them who had already gone and gotten his ToughBook out for the job, and tried to mark it done on there instead of the CE handheld, but ended up faffing about for five minutes before going and getting his jacket and just doing it on the CE device. (A lot of them humoured me when I wanted to watch all their software in action. Some even cautioned me it would be boring - but I was obsessed with PDAs back then so even seeing them mark appointments as finished on their calendar was interesting to me.) Of course I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised they were still running just CE, the ToughBooks were on 98 instead of XP as well. Ultimately it took until 2009 or 2010 before I stopped seeing these devices entirely in favour of just smartphones, but I can’t say for certain they were still on CE and 98 up until that point. I’m certain at least some of the ToughBooks had progressed onto XP with the classic theme by then, so I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some had ended up with Windows Mobile by the end as well. But some of the guys still complained about not being on the “old PDAs” anymore, because with the phones their back office could tell when they’d finished half an hour early and cut off a break at the kneecaps. With the CE devices I remember a lot of them being very pleased when they finished 15 or 30 minutes before they even had to start heading to the next slot, and declaring they were off for tea and sandwiches. Got to imagine that doesn’t happen all too much outside of designated rest hours anymore.

[@NCommander]

It's more confusing than it seems, and I admitly glossed over it. At its core, everything from Pegasus to Mobile ran CE as a kernel, but the system was called Palm-sized PC or Handheld PC (these are actual different targets in the SDK). Palm-sized became Pocket PC, and Handheld sorta vanished. Microsoft got sick of people fucking with the core system so that lead to Windows Mobile, and then Windows Phone, but they're all "CE" devices, abiet with Windows Phone dumping most of the app support. The headache is amazing ...

[@mwethereld]

I still have my Jornada 720, and also had a 680e which i got cheap back in the mid 2000s. I learned that it had CF when i took the bottom plate off! I have both a wired 10/100 NIC and WiFi PCMCIA card for internet access and a whomping 4 gig CF card. You can port it for Debian/Linux which is amazing! It's a neat little unit for its age and a lot of fun to tinker with. Helped me through high school many many moons ago. I also had a Velo 1, but the Jornada was so much nicer.

[@ctcards2636]

I had the Velo 1 too and mine just simply fell apart. Hinge gave out in like 2 months and little things began to go wrong very quick. I saved up at the time and got a 360LX that i still have and own and use. ;-) I did always want the Velo 500 tho ;-) Never saw one in person.

[@NoahAxon]

I purchased one of these Dutch Railways 680e units from Tiger Direct once they got the market back in 2006. I've been using HP Handheld PCs since the HP 300LX in the mid 1990s and it was an affordable way to pick up a nice color screen model. I'm so using several Jornada 720s, which use a more modern ARM CPU and features twice the RAM. The form factor is nearly identical except the CF slot is on the other side and the PCMCIA slot doesn't bulge out of the bottom.

[@NCommander]

I do need a 720 for the collection, but I do miss having handhelds like the Jornada in general. I know we all have supercomputers (reliatvely speaking) in our pocket, but w/ the Jornada and similar, I legitimately felt a laptop less life was possible.

[@NoahAxon]

@@NCommander curiously, modern versions of NetBSD still run on these. They require nothing more than 2 partitions on a sufficiently large CF Card (2gb is plenty) -one FAT partition for the WinCE program that loads a Unix kernel and another partition for NetBSD's files. I've been using these that way for nearly a decade. Here's a quick video of the NetBSD booter at work: instagram.com/reel/CPhNzDWpnrG/

[@NCommander]

@@NoahAxon there are also versions of jLinux that are known to work, although I don't know if the current kernel mainline can run on them (although SH4 is still supported in tree). Right now, I haven't done much w/ the Jornada since this video, but maybe that will be an interesting project for the future.

[@NoahAxon]

​@@NCommander hit me up offline if you'd like to chat about it and collaborate a bit. I haven't been using my KZbin for much retro-nerdery lately (mostly insta over here) I have run jLime Linux as well as Debian on these, but the installs I have are all circa 2006-2008. I fired up the Debian CF card yesterday for giggles and I hadn't logged into it since 2008! Newer Linux kernels might run, but as far as I know, all efforts to keep a functional, modern GNU userland running on these things died more than a decade ago, leaving NetBSD the last one standing. And there are ZERO third-party binary packages pre-compiled for this platform -- not to say that one couldn't compile them, but nobody is hacking on NetBSD is currently doing it at scale. Anyhow, thanks for the nostalgia blast.

[@NCommander]

@@NoahAxon I legitimately hate to say this, but getting a modern userland going to me sounds like a weekend project since I used to do this professionally :/. Assuming SH3/4 support hasn't bitrotted to hell, it probably isn't even that hard to adopt Linux From Scratch for these ... I'm on Twitter and Discord, and my email is in my profile.

[@bslprints9935]

For what it's worth there is a port of Qt to Windows CE. Maybe you can get some KDE applications running on it 😛

[@TheTimeProphet]

I still have one of these Jornada's. Haven't booted it up for years. Pretty sure it didn't have a touch screen though.

[@bslprints9935]

God I used to want one of those foldable windows ce devices so bad. I used to dream about writing programs for a pocket computer. Now of course that's super easy and barely and inconvenience since we all have pocket computers.

[@TheSimoc]

But unfortunately nowadays the increased unprofessionality of software industry and overcomplicatedness of the OSes of "modern pocket computers" have nullified the joy the advanced and prevalent hardware has brought.

[@jayerjavec]

Gopher ... Trumpet Winsock ... names I have long forgotten. Damn I'm old.

[@Lofote]

FYI: Exchange Server at 1999 was not able to do Exchange ActiveSync. It was first released as an add-on for Exchange Server 2000 with "Mobile Information Server 2002". Exchange Server 2003 was the first version with integrated EAS. Thats why your Jornada, which internally still bases on the 1999 HP J 680, doesn't offer to connect to one, only IMAP and POP3. Since the J 680e has no ability to use WIFI or LAN as far as I can see, it would not have been possible anyway to connect to one.

[@NCommander]

... I showed it using LAN, and there is built in WaveLAN support built into the Jornada. Exchange 5.5 didn't support ActiveSync directly, but it did support MAPI which I would have expected to be in Pocket Outlook.

[@Lofote]

@@NCommander Ok then i overlooked LAN/WLAN support. Anyway, since that device was menat to be used mobile, and MAPI was for internal LAN only, I guess that was the reason why they didn't implement it. Just guessing...

[@HikikomoriDev]

This goes quite in depth... fine content.

[@dtvdavid]

I have an HP Jornada 560 and I like it. Sometimes the backlight fails but still works fine. Also have a qwerty keyboard "extension".

[@Lofote]

Daaaaamn, loooong time since I last saw the Exchange Administrator of Exchange Server 5.5. Oh those (pre-ActiveDirectory) times :)

[@NCommander]

It's burned into my brain after the Information Store checked on one production system and the ensuring data recovery ...

[@republicstarwing414]

Does the guy at 3:03 look like a Deluise to any else?

[@derekw6811]

I think the “e” just means European variant. I wonder if the ROMs are identical.

[@NCommander]

I actually suspected that myself, but the only listed difference is the lack of modem. My guess is the 680e was made for Europe, and the English ROMs were basically the first test of the software before localization *or* the first batch was going to the UK.

[@ctcards2636]

Enterprise edition ? @@NCommander

[@ctcards2636]

I got one of these. 680e (enterprise?) version. What web browser are you guys all using on your 680e's ? And whast network adaptor are you using ? Thanks. :-)

[@DidierANDREusa]

10:36 Not French application names...German application names

[@NCommander]

In my defense l used Google translate...

[@DidierANDREusa]

@@NCommander Got it. And it is a little unfair as it is my native language ;) By the way, really like what you are doing !

[@NCommander]

@@DidierANDREusa when I get home, I'll pin a comment

[@gbraadnl]

I remember these being used on the Dutch Railways (NS) for route information. must have been over ten years ago ...

[@lendgryorgan2690]

I have had one of the 680e jornadas since about last 1999 early 2000 I got it while working at a electronics resale company.

[@MarceloMetayer]

Amazed at 11:18! Mercado Libre of Argentina, my country.

[@MilMike]

I remember these devices, I always thought they were named "Joranda" not "Jornada"

[@NCommander]

My first voice-over was like that :)

[@sadev101]

and in my mind i kept referring to them as jordana....

[@mspeter97]

10:35 That's german isn't it?

[@NCommander]

A mistake was made

[@Thiesi]

It is indeed. I paused the video to look for the "French application names" because I was thinking this had some crazy mixture of German _and_ French applications on it before I figured out it was simply a mistake.

[@alvarocafe]

This is so awesome, cheers!

[@medicman4444]

I still have two maybe three of the jornada 720 in my cubbard somewhere and some software discs don't know if they work still tho but used them for 6 years through college

[@RandomInsano2]

I lusted after one of these in 2000 but at $900 it cost too much. Fast forward to 2005 and I bought one on eBay for $60. Also, I think WinCE was difficult to develop for. I have the SDK installed somewhere and it was not intuitive

[@chaoticsystem2211]

The office of this era didn't even play well with itself..

[@AlejandroRodolfoMendez]

On my notebook I made replacement for the rubber feets with a hot glue, if you make it well got the shape and make a good replacement. Another alternatives are 3d pens, and super glue plus sodium bicarbonate.

[@ssokolow]

Isn't the superglue and baking soda option very rigid? I seem to remember running across a guitar-repair video once and seeing it used to fill in something rigid... possibly to the point where they filed it to match the shape if my hazy memory is correct.

[@AlejandroRodolfoMendez]

@@ssokolow it's kinda like 3d printing on the rigidity it's ideal for fixing tiny parts, but the filling is if you put more than it should. You can use nail polish and works the same yet it's easier to apply

[@AlejandroRodolfoMendez]

@@ssokolow yeah in this case the hot glue works better since makes a exact match for the rubber

[@Reziac]

Very neat. I have a "PocketPC 8125" that is a really nice unit (and the 16 year old battery still holds a charge, tho the phone will no longer connect), but you've convinced me... I gotta get me one of its bigger brothers. :) For that disk that won't read, try "Closing" the session in Nero or whatever else has that function. Often CDRs don't get closed properly and then they won't read in older Windows.

[@user-gc1ky2rf3y]

I think I have a 680e somewhere. If so it’s a non-NL version.

[@Faizht]

Really nice and competent explanation! One apiece of advice, if i may: the background music under your voice is a bit too loud, and quite distracting... keep it up!

[@NCommander]

Apologies. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do BGM.

[@Faizht]

@@NCommander No worries, great work!

[@PixelOutlaw]

It would be cool to get Emacs on there but I'm not sure how painful it'd be. Even with a SUPER old version of Emacs.

[@kaviennn]

There isn’t a Dutch windows ce rom, only English, Japanese, French and German

[@RonLaws]

i kinda want to see if some flavour of Linux can be run on this. I got Amstrung Linux running on my HP iPaq back in the day and turned it in to a mini web server for kicks

[@ctcards2636]

Theres a video of someone running linux off a CF card in a 680 or a 690. Google it

[@glassnerves]

I have a Jornada 720 and it is sad that there are few applications for it and most of them are paid. Unfortunately the latest versions of NetBSD that support it are very slow, practically unusable.

[@NCommander]

680e is even worse, sicne its SuperH >.

[@thomasandrews9355]

Where you located? Got a katana in my collection.

[@NCommander]

New Jersey/New York area.

[@MisterCOM]

you might have lost some interesting ns specefic software when you reset it on a side note i have a NS rail reader somewhere around here

[@NCommander]

Battery was dead when I got it, so there was nothing to recover. From what I've been told, the software was likely on an external CF card.

[@MissFoxification]

There was a reason we called it "Activestink".

[@KnutBluetooth]

I wonder what's the BSOD score of 95 and CE to make this video possible.

[@NCommander]

Zero actually.

[@KnutBluetooth]

@@NCommander Perhaps you should get in touch with the vatican.

[@LouisReedijk]

you have no idea how much abuse those things got to endure :) I use to work for a company who soled and serviced them for the NS, those where fun times :)

[@LaskyLabs]

It's shockingly hard to get Windows CE computers.

[@NCommander]

It's mostly knowing the right search terms. For the most part, they weren't sold under the name "Windows CE", but instead "Handheld PC" or "Palm-sized PC" for the earlier ones, and "Pocket PC" and "Windows Mobile" for the later ones. Usually what shows up when you search WIndows CE are embedded devices that someone made that weren't for general retail.

[@LaskyLabs]

@@NCommander that's all I really needed to know actually. Thanks. Have a good weekend.

[@mustacheboyo]

@@LaskyLabs alot of GPSes likely from before 2013 run Windows CE. Brands like Mio, Magellan, ASUS, Nokia, Sanyo, etc.

[@keyboard_g]

Period correct tribal tattoo spotted at @20:39

[@therealjammit]

I had a desktop with an IR port and a Journada. Just like you the IR ports were in a "weird" place. I had taped a piece of tinfoil on a wall that allowed me to bounce the IR between machines without rotating them in a funny position.

[@csanderse]

I was a Windows CE developer for 6 years I wasn’t hard if you knew you C but using anything else was not a pleasant experience

[@daddust]

You say 1990, not 1999

[@friedrichsinofzik5969]

Good memories using one of these .

[@Shiunbird]

Bravo!!! Before anything else... Do you own the Entertainment Pack? I found some copies on eBay, but OMG, the price just doesn't justify it. Since I've been using 2 Windows CE devices (I own a 2.11, a 3.0, a 5.0 and a 6.0 device) daily since I got them, here come my rather lengthy 2 cents: - Synchronisation: After many tribulations and checking the hpcfactor forums, I found out that the ideal way to synchronise Windows CE is through Windows XP, ActiveSync 3.6 and Office 2007/2010. My original wet dream was to use Windows 2000, just because it's my favourite Windows version ever, but then I can't run caldavsynchronizer. I managed to get a special Windows XP fork to work after fixing some problems with the installer. With the cal dar sync pointing to my home nextcloud server, I have full calendar integration between my iPhone and both my Jornada 720 and my Aero 8000. I posted a video about the whole process. - I've had a very different experience with Access. I managed to export the template nutrition tracking database from the latest Access, export it using the legacy Office format (original xls, ppt, etc) and then sync it through with ActiveSync and it works well. It's quite surprising to see 20 years of compatibility there. However, I agree with you - it seems that it is really more of a development tool. There's no way anyone would be able to keep databases synchronised this way. - My Jornada 720 still holds charge for around 3 hours of usage. My Aero 8000 was ok when I got it, but not anymore. I never got a previous Jornada because I HATE THE WINDOWS 98 RECYCLE BIN ICON!!! Honestly, it's either the 95 one or the Windows 2000 one. The Windows XP Luna theme looks absolutely lame on Windows CE. There are some funny inconsistencies. On my Aero 8000 with CE 2.11, in some place you see the Windows 95 recycle bin icon. On my Jornada 720, in some places you see the Windows 98 recycle bin icon. - The command prompt under CE 2.11 is awful and nearly useless, but they added a lot of missing features on CE 3.0/2000. More importantly, it offers stdio when you write C code. Unfortunately, no time.h =( - It supports a lot of storage. I managed to add 3x 16GB CF cards to my Aero 8000. =)))))))))) Since the machine has zero multimedia capabilities, you can store endless documents. - The bottom of your Jornada case seems to have been designed to avoid users to access the slots. Nothing else justifies it. It's more bulk for nothing. - Visual C++ and the CE APIs are really painful. My CE 6 device doesn't have the command prompt and I couldn't get any output to write properly to the screen. I haven't had the time to figure out exactly how the APIs work. It's very frustrating. The best OS I found out to write and test things is Windows 2000. I have both Windows XP and 2000 running in VMs and it works perfectly fine. You can swap between devices fine and synchronise them as "guests", so you don't ruin your "production" ActiveSync pairing while testing software. Visual C++ will launch software just fine to a Guest device. - I don't think the issues with sync were all that relevant at the time. Most computers still operated as isolated silos and network connectivity was not a given even in companies. At the time, my father worked as a sales person for a big Pharma and they didn't have internet access even in the office. And he was in the sales team! He had a laptop that he used mostly to prepare documents for clients. He had a wonderful black and white battery powered infrared LaserJet. Back to the office, he would move the relevant documents to an office computer that he shared with his whole team using a floppy disk and someone had to manually upload the relevant data to some AS/400 server using a terminal emulator. The office computer ran Windows NT and you would log in, send the e-mails you need, upload the required data and log out. I assume that, if they had WinCE devices, you would connect your device when you were logged into the computer, get the data sync done, and then let someone else use the computer. - I didn't find the Pocket Word files to be significantly smaller, but they also support features that the standard word doesn't, such as this meeting summary template with expandable subsections. However, I never manage to get any image into Pocket Word, and am quite surprised that you managed to get that ClipArt. - My Jornada came with standard pressed CDs, not CD-Rs. - FloodGap rules. What an amazing guy! - There's a software for CE 2.11 SH-3 (maybe 4, no compatibility guaranteed) that converts any Pocket Office document into PPT via a virtual printer driver. It's called JETCET PowerPoint Companion. Office PowerPoint is officially read-only. - I wonder if you can do anything with the d3x libraries offered with CE 2.11 SH-4 in Visual C++. =)

[@NCommander]

That's a sealed copy that arrived the day before I finished video editing.

[@Kigen763]

Heh sneakers. Cool cool cool!

[@TuNnL]

I can't believe you are the only one who caught that! "My voice is my passport. Verify me." Classic line from Sneakers. Great Robert Redford movie. 🎥

[@electrocatalyst]

You didn't run Doom on it. You will be frowned upon.🤨

[@mikv8]

You can try a glue gun to make these rubber feet. BTW I used to have a 720 Jornada in 2000 if I remember correctly. It was pretty a expensive toy with almost zero real use. Paired with my Nokia 8850 I used the thing to browse websites. It was ridiculously expensive to dial over a cell line and pay for every single minute using the internet.

[@yueibm]

The plot thickens!

[@NCommander]

You could say it's a trainload at this point ... *seems himself out for that*

[@yueibm]

@@NCommander Hahaha good one! And thanks for the great videos!!

[@drumboy02]

lol @ the google suggested results after typing "hp "

[@thogameskanaal]

Dames en heren

[@RolandKaos]

Hi, My name is Werner Brandis

[@Hotaru-jp]

JORNADA in portuguese= journey

[@My_Alchemical_Romance]

4:02 sugru

[@JeffreyPiatt]

Windows CE devices had native sync support in Vista and Windows 7 with Pocket PC connection software..