Total share: 30 years of personal computer market share figures

The end of eras (1990-1994)

The golden age of PC gaming had arrived, with classics like Wing Commander, DOOM, Ultima 7 and System Shock pushing the boundaries of computer entertainment. At the same time, the PC became easier to use with the release of Windows 3 in 1990 and 3.1 in 1992. The latter operating system proved incredibly popular, pushing PC sales back from their minislump in 1991. By 1994 PCs and clones were selling at the incredible rate of 37 million units per year.

The Macintosh was also doing well, rising from 1.3 million units in 1990 to its all-time high of 4.5 million units in 1995. Macintosh market share peaked at 12% in 1993. It was a boom time for Apple, with the future looking bright.

Other companies were not so lucky. Sales of the Atari ST tailed off and only 30,000 units were sold in 1993. Atari itself fell into a severe cashflow crisis as Nintendo had taken all of its console market share, and the company was sold to hard drive manufacturer JTS in 1996.

The venerable Commodore 64 also fell off sharply, dropping from 1.25 million units in 1989 to only 175,000 units in 1993. This sudden loss of revenue hurt the company greatly. Sales of Amigas had also fallen drastically as new management cancelled best-selling units like the 500 and replaced them with the more expensive yet feature-poor 600, while delaying the next generation of AGA machines that would have competed with the PC's VGA chipset. Stuck with tons of old machines that couldn't sell and unable to build enough new machines for the Christmas '93 season, the company fell into a downward financial spiral which led inevitably to its bankruptcy in April 1994.

Steve Jobs, exiled from Apple in 1985 because of poor sales of the original Macintosh, had built a new company called NeXT out of his personal fortune. The first NeXT cubes shipped in 1988, but their US$10,000 price tag doomed them to the same fate as the Lisa. NeXT never shipped more than 16,000 computers in a single year, and in 1993 the company laid off many of their employees and dropped all of their hardware to focus entirely on an Intel version of their operating system called NEXTSTEP/486. The company still failed to make money, however, and wound up being sold to Apple in 1996.

The PC kept soldiering on relentlessly, rising from 84% marketshare in 1990 to over 90% in 1994. However, there was still a chance for alternative operating systems to rise to dominance on that platform. The release of OS/2 2.0 by IBM in 1992 was briefly seen as a legitimate challenger to Windows, selling over two million copies. A new open-source, enthusiast operating system called Linux, first released in 1991, was starting to take shape and slowly gained popularity in academic circles. There was even GeoWorks Ensemble, a version of the GEOS GUI for the Commodore 64 that was much faster on low-end hardware than Windows due to it being written largely in assembly language. However, everything would change the following year.