> The large majority of folks were still running straight MS-DOS.
My recollection is by 1994, Windows 3.1 was everywhere. My school had literally dozens of computers running it. It was on every PC at my father’s work. We had several computers in our house and they all ran it except the 286 we used to play games (which my dad ended up giving to his brother, since it was a big upgrade to the 8086 he’d been using to run WordStar)
At home we didn’t run Windows 3.1 full-time, we’d exit to DOS to play games. But we’d use Microsoft Word to write assignments for school.
I dual-booted into OS/2 2.0 because I was really into computers. Nobody else in the house knew what to do with it, and I didn’t know anyone else who ran it. After a while OS/2 got replaced by Slackware, and nobody else knew what to do with that either.
My school had mostly MS-DOS 5.0 computers, the UNIX class was taught by bringing a PC tower with Xenix, where the class would take 15 m turns after preparing their samples on MS-DOS with Turbo C 2.0, and it was a model school.
In 1992 I did my typing exam using MS-DOS 3.3, on edlin.
The other school down the block was still using Amstrad PC1512, with CGA and EGA monitors.
Most of us had Ataris and Amigas at home, if families were rich enough, otherwise we had to still make do with our C64 and Spectrum variants.
By the early 1990s most families (in my upper middle class milieu) had PCs. Minority had something else instead-Macs and Amigas most commonly.
9 year old me started using Windows 3.0 in 1991, when it was still quite rare in the home. My dad pirated from his work, which were adopting it. But by 1994 or so I was seeing Windows 3.x everywhere (mostly 3.1 or WfW 3.11 instead of 3.0)
I went to three different primary schools. First one (1987-1991) had Apple IIs; second one (1991-1992) had one computer lab containing IBM PC JXs running DOS (the JX was a derivative of the PCjr only sold in Japan, Australia and NZ), another with Acorns, and classrooms had a mix of Apple IIGS and 8-bit Apple II; third one (1993), our classroom had a C64 and an Acorn, and I know some other classrooms had Macs. Secondary school (1994-1999) was all PCs and Acorns. I think all the PCs ran Windows 3.x (later in 1990s newer machines got Windows 95), and most were in Windows nearly all the time. The exception was the machines in the CAD lab, which probably had Windows installed, but our CAD software only ran under DOS, so Windows was rarely used on them.
Around 1997 or so people were throwing out old 8-bit machines like crazy. I went to the school fair and bought a pile of Apple IIs and C64s for $5 each. Unfortunately my dad made me get rid of them all because he didn’t like the clutter.
Plenty of people ran BBSes on DOS, but there's not much of a reason to run a BBS on Windows 3. Windows 3 doesn't give you anything that a DOS based BBS hadn't already figured out. At best, you might run your DOS BBS inside a command prompt in Windows.
Windows 3.1 provided no services which would have been relevant to MUD development. It didn't even have a networking stack - Trumpet Winsock was a third-party addon, and wasn't compatible with Berkeley sockets.
