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> Probably the vast majority of those users also called local BBSes. This is an absurd notion. The opposite is probably true, that most if not every single BBS
by Maursault 4y ago
> Probably the vast majority of those users also called local BBSes.
This is an absurd notion. The opposite is probably true, that most if not every single BBS user also used dialup services, but most users of dialup services probably were entirely unaware of any BBS.
btw, CompuServe never had more than 250K subscribers total. Prodigy had far less. So it is likely Facebook math being performed here with subscriptions that existed but were never used.
- icedchai 4y agoThe reality is most people could not afford online services. This is anecdotal, but most local BBS users I knew did not use CompuServe, Prodigy, or any of the others. The hourly fees were expensive. This is all ancient history, but most articles I look at showed CompuServe around 500K by 1990: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/tracks-the-number-of-households-subscribing-to-CompuServe-The-Source-Delphi-and-GEnie_fig2_24081644 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/tracks-the-number-of-hou...