The Mysterious Dutch Railways HP Jornada 680e

Well, here we go again with yet another strange eBay purchase. I swear I run into these without even trying to find them. In this case, I picked up a HP Jornada 680e, and I quickly realized that not everything was at it seems with this device. In fact, this is a specific handheld that was sold and owned by the Dutch Railways company, Nederlandse Spoorwegen. While a corporate owned device isn't that special in and of itself, the rabbit hole would only get deeper the further I go.

There's actually a fair bit of information on the 680e, since it seems these devices were sold at bargin basement prices by TigerDirect in 2005, but for a device created in 1999, there's a shocking lack of period specific information. Aside from the manual, there's nearly nothing from the period in which it was released. That thus begs the question, is this some sort of specific device made for Dutch Railways, or is there something deeper going on here?

Just at a glance, we can tell that the device has been customized. Dutch Railways obviously fitted the device with a very high end injection molded plastic cover. We can also see that some modifications have been made like removal of the plastic voice memo features. In and of itself, these things are not that unique; I've seen other branded and customized devices in my time in industry.

However, where things get strange is when we look at the modified keyboard layout, and the more in-depth changes that were made to the device make it clear that these changes go far beyond what would be vendor specific, such as a customized keyboard layout. As such, it becomes more and more clear that the Jornada was clearly intended for retail through Europe, and it's by piecing together a large multitude of puzzle pieces that I think we approached something resembling the truth.

Even after putting the entire story together, it was a matter of figuring out what was going on with Windows CE Services, setting up Windows 95, and digging deeper and deeper into madness. Along the way, I'd end up setting Exchange 5.5 and Windows NT server, as well as extensively testing ActiveSync along the way.

Then, much to my dread, I would end up having to install embedded Visual C++ to compile a hello world application for Windows CE to show that a Dutch localized application would indeed work correctly on the Jornada.

Interesting Timestamps:
00:00 - Introducing the Jornada
02:10 - The 680e Specificiations
03:15 - Unboxing
04:40 - The 680e's "missing features"
06:30 - The Six Year Information Gap
08:00 - Theorizing on the 680e Oorigins
12:21 - The PC part of the PC Companion
14:00 - Windows CE Services
16:00 - Pocket Office Overview
21:55 - Thoughts about Windows CE
23:30 - Closing

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Music licensed from Epidemic Sound (https://www.epidemicsound.com/)
- Stop N Start - Harry Edvino
- Paradigm Shift - Gavin Luke
- The Prophecy - Dream Cave
- Silent Approval Howard Harper Barnes
- Acceleration - Dream Cave
- Frozen Thunder - Hampus Naeslus
- A Dream To Keep - Alec Slayne
- Cause for Concern - Howard Harper Barnes
- Wagon's Rest Alfie Jay Winters
- Incidental Encounter - Arthur Benson
- No Clues Left - Arthur Benson
- Stavselet - Strom

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