I’ve seen Windows/386 2.03 pop up all over the place.

Indeed, I had written about it in 2017…

https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2017/12/03/run-windows-2000-in-your-browser/

It’s super cool!

u can run win2k in your browser

Yep, I had WordPerfect 5.1 for UnixWare (x11), although it was one of those too little too late type things. The sale to Novell certainly didn’t help things as Novell tried to create their own ‘office suite’ to counteract the Microsoft Office.

At the University I went to, PC’s would come bundled with DOS/Windows+Office 4.x for super cheap making it a standard ‘by default’ although a lot of people rebelled at the idea of using MS Word, so we had Word Perfect all over the place. Although we were all told to use it because everyone was used to it, we had one holdout secretary that used MS Word for DOS of all things… And it just wasn’t worth the fight as we moved 100% to Windows, then to Windows 95.

When I got a job at a bank though, you had to requisition everything separately which was a major ordeal, and Microsoft sure knew this, and their bundling meant you only had to go through the process once.

That said I used to like Word 2, and really didn’t like the whole Word 6 thing. Word 95 just didn’t feel right and I actually was a big fan of 97. Although I’ve been using Word 2 again and other than format drift, it’s so much easier to find things. 2016 and the ribbon things in the 2008 world was such a step backwards. Now I’m the obsolete user.

WordPerfect did port to other platforms, like that nice OS/2 port of 5.1. The problem is WordPerfect power users were used to the text only interface and keyboard commands, neither of which the GUI versions supported all that well. WordPerfect 6.0 was pretty good, but the whole Novell sale around the time Windows 95 came out delayed the 32-bit version way too long (and it didn’t even run on NT initially). Microsoft had Office 95 ready to go on day 1 which really killed off WordPerfect’s dominance for good.

I was thinking of 3rd party VARs but when you put the massive leap Excel handed Microsoft, it really put them on the map.

I remember getting the disks for 1-2+3 for OS/2 and was surprised it was just a full screen text mode app. They really did miss the market. WordPerfect as well was super guilty of holding onto that text UI.

The big application for Windows 2.x was Excel. It was listed as achieving 12% of the PC spreadsheet software market in 1989 compared to 54% for Lotus 1-2-3 which suggests Excel sales of about 500,000 for the year. Word for Windows probably sold about 100,000 in 1989. Windows 2 itself was selling at about 50,000 per month. Micrografx, Aldus, Micrografx all sold reasonably well in their Windows versions but those were not exactly major mass market products.

Lotus 123 and Wordperfect were both multi-million sellers at the time. The Mac was selling at about the same volume as Windows 2 but Mac users spent roughly three times as much on software as DOS users.

The A20 gate was such… a crazy thing to have gone though.

The ‘big’ applications from Windows 2.x were Corel Draw ,Aldus Page Maker and Micrografx Designer. I’m pretty sure they didn’t sell a large number of copies of either that runtime version of Windows, or Windows itself, but rather Microsoft was getting 3rd parities to write apps for Windows which certainly was more important than sales numbers at that point.

I’m sure you’ve seen this page:
http://toastytech.com/guis/win1x2x.html

Also I like that email gateway thing you have on your home page…

And yes, I was reflecting and had the same conclusion – any hardware that’s capable of running Windows 386 should probably run 3.1 instead, since that can run actual applications. My recollection of the time is nobody really used 2.x.