Having spent my youth childishly ranting against the evils of M$, and now coming to terms with the fact that I sincerely use VS Code because it's great, I can't shake the frequent uncanny feeling that I'm stuck in an episode of Sliders.
Dos + win 3.11 was an absolute crap. Had a mac at the time and i couldn't understand how people could cope with that horror. Anything, from atari to amiga to mac was obviously better.
Windows started to be usable starting windows 95. Before that, it was mainly a hack.
Windows 3.x was wonderful if you had DOS, which was almost everyone did. DOS, WordStar (or Word Perfect) and Lotus 1-2-3.
It was really cheap [1], and it ran on top of DOS, so you didn't lose anything you already had. The big advantage was access to a GUI and new graphical applications. If you didn't like it, you didn't have to run it, but it was always more useful than the old-style character-based DOS front-ends.
The alternatives to Windows 3.x involved paying up to 20x more for a different operating system, installing it, and possibly losing what you already had, OR dumping your whole expensive system and buying another expensive system, buying expensive new apps, and relearning everything.
Worse, you'd be buying another expensive system while losing access to Lotus 1-2-3 (on which your commercial life probably depended).
The real alternatives weren't the 68000-based Amiga/Atari/Mac etc, they were DesQview and DR GEM.
Not sure why DesQview failed. However, Apple did Microsoft a huge favor by suing Digital Research and effectively killing GEM (except on the Atari ST).
[1] From my faulty memory, it was something like $40 when business applications cost $200 to $600. OS/2 cost around $500 and Sun was charging $950 for Unix.
