Unless you had a modem. First with online services and then with the Internet, OS/2 provided a vastly superior solution to DOS and Windows 3.x. Even when Windows 95 came out, OS/2 had a bit of a lead since it took software developers a while to catch up in terms of performance and stability.

One of my favourite experiences was convincing my high school computer programming teacher to leave a computer configured to boot off of floppies, just so that I could use a stripped down version of OS/2 (no GUI). While a lot of students were constantly rebooting after their program took Windows 95 down with it, I was chugging along without major issues. Even when the board cracked down on that, the teacher let me program on the solitary NT server. Even in university, I managed to weasel my way into the grad student's Solaris lab as an undergraduate. While my peers were watching their Maple sessions take out Windows 95/98, I was able to use the Solaris computers to both get my work done and show the other where things went horribly wrong (thus enabling them to complete their projects).

While Windows 3.x and Windows 95 were sufficient for most people because it got the job done, people are forgetting how truly unstable those platforms were. Even when problems were a product of third party software, people are forgetting how the more rigorous memory protection of Unix, OS/2, and Windows NT enabled developers to detect and resolve memory addressing problems during the development phase. Thankfully, Microsoft has made incredible progress on that front.