Comment by AnimalMuppet
1 day 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?
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.
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....
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.
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.]
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.