5 ms·

If you say so. I don't have any hard numbers (I would love to see them, either way), but I think there was a brief moment around 1990 when BBS usage was more wi

by morsch 4y ago

If you say so. I don't have any hard numbers (I would love to see them, either way), but I think there was a brief moment around 1990 when BBS usage was more widespread than the Internet. I wouldn't (and didn't) say BBS usage was widespread in absolute terms. Nor did I say anything about the significance of anything.

AlbertCory 4y ago
I don't have hard numbers on BBS, but on the internet-history@ mailing list, someone estimated there were around a million people worldwide on the Internet in 1990. This is a pretty informed estimate. You think BBS was more than that?
- morsch 4y ago
  Apparently, there were close to 7000 Fidonet nodes in 1990[1]. What's a reasonable average for distinct user accounts per node? I don't know. If it's 100, that's 0.7 million already. Compuserve had 380000 users in 1987[2], when it was basically US-only. Now, I don't want to argue that Compuserve is a BBS (though I suppose you could). But it's evidence people were using their modems to connect to things that weren't the internet. And Compuserve in 1987 apparently had no ability to exchange information with the Internet proper; when I used it as a child, a couple of years later, I used Compuserve -- its groups, pages, whatever they were called, and did not use it for Internet access. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#/media/Datei:Fidonodes.PNG https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#/media/Datei:Fidonodes... almost 40000 at its peak in 1996 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#Market_share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#Market_share
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    I wouldn't dispute any of your numbers. It sounds like they were roughly comparable. At least that's the best we can say 34 years later.
- icedchai 4y ago
  Yes, much more. The internet didn’t go mainstream until the mid-90’s. According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system there “were 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the United States alone in 1994.”
  - Maursault 4y ago
    First of all, "in the US alone," is misleading because the vast majority of BBS and their users were actually in the US. In 1990, the Internet was composed of 350,000 hosts being accessed by over a million computers (aka users). 60K BBSs means a capacity of exactly 60K users simultaneously, while the Internet capacity at the time was... more that a million simultaneous users... IOW all of them. The Internet (called ARPANET) was very well established by 1973, but experienced exponential growth from the advent of WWW. Your citation has no citation of its own. Curious how there could be 17M BBS users in 1994 when the US had only 11M modem-equipped computers.[1] IOW, the wiki is very wrong, and the claim is unsupportable. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/1995/10/16/americans-going-online-explosive-growth-uncertain-destinations/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/1995/10/16/americans-go...
    - icedchai 4y ago
      Even if it’s only 11 million, most of those users were not on the internet in 1994. They were on local BBSes, CompuServe, GEnie, The Source, and other online services. Do you remember that time? I do. I’ve started BBSing in the late 80’s and first got on the Internet in 1991. It was mostly academics, defense contractors, and early ISPs… which generally started as BBSes. I don’t dispute the early internet could’ve supported many more users than BBSes. They simply weren’t there yet.
      - Maursault 4y ago
        You are vastly overestimating the size of that population of BBS users, and vastly underestimating the population of academics and students at hundreds of universities as well as engineers and computer scientists at hundreds of companies. It wasn't everyone logging into BBS, wasn't most people, and if you were logging into BBS in 1990, you were pretty special. In 1983, when I was using BBS, I never met another soul until 1989 that had any idea what I was doing. If you were at university using the Internet, this was commonplace by 1990, and really it was pretty common by 1980. But since you're apparently unaware that a network of networks of hundreds of universities and hundreds of corporations spanning the globe existed prior to your awareness of BBS, it makes a lot of sense that you might believe that.

by morsch 4y ago

AlbertCory 4y ago

I don't have hard numbers on BBS, but on the internet-history@ mailing list, someone estimated there were around a million people worldwide on the Internet in 1990. This is a pretty informed estimate. You think BBS was more than that?

morsch 4y ago
Apparently, there were close to 7000 Fidonet nodes in 1990[1]. What's a reasonable average for distinct user accounts per node? I don't know. If it's 100, that's 0.7 million already. Compuserve had 380000 users in 1987[2], when it was basically US-only. Now, I don't want to argue that Compuserve is a BBS (though I suppose you could). But it's evidence people were using their modems to connect to things that weren't the internet. And Compuserve in 1987 apparently had no ability to exchange information with the Internet proper; when I used it as a child, a couple of years later, I used Compuserve -- its groups, pages, whatever they were called, and did not use it for Internet access. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#/media/Datei:Fidonodes.PNG https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#/media/Datei:Fidonodes... almost 40000 at its peak in 1996 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#Market_share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#Market_share
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  I wouldn't dispute any of your numbers. It sounds like they were roughly comparable. At least that's the best we can say 34 years later.
icedchai 4y ago
Yes, much more. The internet didn’t go mainstream until the mid-90’s. According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system there “were 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the United States alone in 1994.”
- Maursault 4y ago
  First of all, "in the US alone," is misleading because the vast majority of BBS and their users were actually in the US. In 1990, the Internet was composed of 350,000 hosts being accessed by over a million computers (aka users). 60K BBSs means a capacity of exactly 60K users simultaneously, while the Internet capacity at the time was... more that a million simultaneous users... IOW all of them. The Internet (called ARPANET) was very well established by 1973, but experienced exponential growth from the advent of WWW. Your citation has no citation of its own. Curious how there could be 17M BBS users in 1994 when the US had only 11M modem-equipped computers.[1] IOW, the wiki is very wrong, and the claim is unsupportable. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/1995/10/16/americans-going-online-explosive-growth-uncertain-destinations/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/1995/10/16/americans-go...
  - icedchai 4y ago
    Even if it’s only 11 million, most of those users were not on the internet in 1994. They were on local BBSes, CompuServe, GEnie, The Source, and other online services. Do you remember that time? I do. I’ve started BBSing in the late 80’s and first got on the Internet in 1991. It was mostly academics, defense contractors, and early ISPs… which generally started as BBSes. I don’t dispute the early internet could’ve supported many more users than BBSes. They simply weren’t there yet.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      You are vastly overestimating the size of that population of BBS users, and vastly underestimating the population of academics and students at hundreds of universities as well as engineers and computer scientists at hundreds of companies. It wasn't everyone logging into BBS, wasn't most people, and if you were logging into BBS in 1990, you were pretty special. In 1983, when I was using BBS, I never met another soul until 1989 that had any idea what I was doing. If you were at university using the Internet, this was commonplace by 1990, and really it was pretty common by 1980. But since you're apparently unaware that a network of networks of hundreds of universities and hundreds of corporations spanning the globe existed prior to your awareness of BBS, it makes a lot of sense that you might believe that.