From Breakthroughs to Returns: The Short-lived Journey of Microsoft’s OS/2

One of the Windows developers, Dave Plummer, who today has already shared the results of a unique test of 25 different PC models released over 50 years, published a post about the worst-selling Microsoft product in the company’s history.

Photo X (Dave W Plummer) The photograph shows the Mach 10 accelerator board. This was a very unusual device, with no analogs on the market today. In fact, it was an external processor that connected via cable to the native socket in IBM PC, replacing the PC’s native processor. In this case, it involved replacing the Intel 8088 running at 4.77 MHz with an Intel 8086 running at 9.54 MHz. The Mach 10 board was pioneering at the time, offering a 100% speed increase over the existing processor. Subsequently, the Mach 20 board was released, which gained a certain popularity. Such that Microsoft decided to release the OS/2 operating system for this board. However, Microsoft sold only 11 copies of this system during its time. But the record doesn’t stop there because eight of those 11 copies were later returned. Thus, only three copies were actually sold. The limited success could be attributed to the highly competitive landscape of the early personal computing era, with IBM dominating with its PC models and other giants like Apple innovating with their Macintosh series.