In March 1996 MeadCo's founder Jerry Mead and longtime developer colleague Pete Cole took a trip to a Microsoft PDC in search of a 'simple HTML rendering OCX' to help lessen Mead's documentation company's reliance on the Windows Help engine.
Excited by what they had seen, the two returned home and continued to exchange ideas for a system of controllable, styleable Windows for the Web which could overcome the limitations of the 'monocular' browser UI.
By Easter 1998 the code and thinking behind Zeepe (at that time the product was named 'Web Page Manager') had hardened sufficiently for it to be handed on to a bright young development team to take forward. For a time our architectural concepts and work-in-progress were posted to our sites, but some blatant big-company plagiarism stopped that fairly quickly.
In early 1999 a competent evaluation build of an enhanced product - by then codenamed 'WPM 5.0' - was released to selected industry partners. Their feedback was rapid and encouraging.
Background development continued following the mid-1999 release and subsequent explosive takeup of ScriptX and the Security Manager licensing schema. Over time WPM became Zeepe, and in 2001 Pete Cole returned to enhance and 'case harden' the project in the run-up to the release of version 7.0. Progress in the years since has been spectacular!
The Zeepe SDK is available for download here. We hope you find it convincing and useful.