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points by egorfine 15 hours ago | 0 comments

> Windows 3.1 [] not that there were many alternatives at that time

OS/2 was more popular than Windows 3.1.

Update: or maybe it wasn't. Seems like different bubbles had different mainstream OS.

Oh man, the good old days. Running Windows apps in OS/2 and having OS/2 run them faster because it was true 32bit.

OS/2 more popular, not in my part of Europe, although it had its fan base. there were even OS/2 (Warp) freebie cd-roms at the time. I was quite fond of it, but Win 95 killed it

[–] pjmlp 14 hours ago

It certainly wasn't in Europe, plus it required more expensive hardware.

Back in 1992, it would had cost me about an extra 500 euros on today's money.

[–] huhtenberg 13 hours ago

OS/2 was _incredibly_ rare UI- and UX-wise. Very frustrating to use. As if they copied Windows, but somehow copied only 80% of it with some really common bits missing.

[–] egorfine 11 hours ago

Hindsight is 20/20 though

[–] AnimalMuppet 15 hours ago

Source? That's sure not the way I remember it. I don't think I ever saw OS/2 outside of in computer stores. I don't think I ever saw a single customer actually using it, either professionally or on a home computer.

Sure, that's anecdote. Do you have data?

[–] SoftTalker 14 hours ago

OS/2 was somewhat popular in corporate settings that were already "IBM shops." And I saw a bit of it in academia/scientific workplaces.

Never knew anyone who ran it at home.

[–] svennek 14 hours ago

I ran it at home as a teenager, as I got a free Warp cd at a store (when they cancelled the product). Ran it for a few days, then went back to windows (95 likely) and later linux....

[–] egorfine 14 hours ago

Nah, no data. Too lazy to dig around. I vividly remember that in my bubble OS/2 was running everywhere. Literally everybody used it, me included. We considered Windows a joke. Some networking software that we used (Fidonet) was literally OS/2 only.

But then I remember how OS/2 was dying a slow death while Windows 95 rose.

So yes, an anecdote it is.

[–] AnimalMuppet 14 hours ago

Well, I asked, because I'm also too lazy to dig around for data. So, it's hard for me to complain...

[Edit: All right, I did a very superficial digging, and didn't get an apples-to-apples comparison. But it said that OS/2 sold 2.5 million desktop and 340,000 server versions in 1996. Windows 3.1 sold over 3 million copies within the first three months of its release in 1992. So by 1996, OS/2 may have been more popular than Windows 3.1, because the Windows world had moved on to Win95.]

[–] flomo 12 hours ago

IBM did a ton of consumer advertising for OS/2 while Windows 95 was delayed. (There even was an OS/2 Warp college bowl game.) So they moved some copies, but it probably mostly just people like me messing around.