This is why it never saw mass adoption. Strange, tiny, proprietary distribution method that nobody could use because no companies bothered to make a 1.44" floppy drive. You had to build one from scratch if you wanted to use OS/2. (The best place to start was by harvesting the motor from a larger drive.) Thus, only the true tinkerers and hackers ever made it past "Step 1 - Preparing Your System."
(Somebody went and edited the main article, thus rendering this thread moot. Quite a shame, really. Typos can be fun. ;) )
We stumbled upon either a 2" or 2.5" floppy early in my college career. None of us had ever heard of such a beast - it was a bit like alien tech landing in our laps. We figured it was "the future" and that smaller floppies would see mass-adoption, as some sort of CD-killer.
Then our professor destroyed our dream world and said they'd died off in the 80s. (And then wisely predicted flash-like memory would kill off all of them.)
There's a wide range of weird floppy sizes. Perhaps one of the best known was sold for the Amstrad PCW - a popular word processing system. (This machine kept CP/M alive during the 80s and into the early 90s.)
(Somebody went and edited the main article, thus rendering this thread moot. Quite a shame, really. Typos can be fun. ;) )