Vole debuted Windows CE in November 1996 without ever telling anyone what "CE" meant. The best suggestion was "compact embedded" but this was never confirmed. We once got a Microsoft bloke drunk at a press do and he admitted he had not got a clue what it meant either. 

Ironically, it would have been the operating system which would have propelled Microsoft to mobile phone dominence had that market not been carved up by Google and Apple.

It appeared just after Windows NT 4, the first version of NT and had the Explorer desktop from Windows 95. 

In 2011, Microsoft said it would be replaced by a unified platform based on Windows 8, but that did not work that well and Vole decided to move to a container on top of Win10 IoT.