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'

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