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Let's break it down. CompuServe, the oldest of the big 3 dialup services, never had more than 250K subscribers, and it was bought by AOL in 1997. When AOL went

Let's break it down. CompuServe, the oldest of the big 3 dialup services, never had more than 250K subscribers, and it was bought by AOL in 1997. When AOL went public in 1992, it had fewer than 200K subscribers.[1] At its peak, in 2002, AOL had 25M subscribers.[2] The rest of the dialup services never totaled more than 500K subscribers combined, total for their entire existance. Again, in 1990, the Internet had 350K hosts worldwide and over a million users. The total number of dialup subscribers in 1990 doesn't begin to approach that number, and it doesn't matter if you pile on all BBS users, because BBS at its peak, low hundreds of them. Within 2 years of WWW arriving, there were only 20 left.[3] So take your 10K BBS users, take all the CompuServe users ever, 250K, take the 200K AOL users in 1990, and all the other dialup subscribers for the entirety of their existence, 500K, and with this screwed up cheating math, you might get a million to match the over a million Internet users in 1990. [1] https://time.com/3857628/aol-1985-history/ https://time.com/3857628/aol-1985-history/ [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Aol_subscribers_Q201-Q407.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Aol_subs... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-lost-civilization-of-dial-up-bulletin-board-systems/506465/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-l...

icedchai 4y ago
I will admit it difficult to get accurate numbers, but this Wikipedia article claims CompuServe had 600K and Prodigy had 450K+ subscribers in 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) It references NY Times articles that are pay walled. This graph shows roughly 12,000 BBSes existing in 1990: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/support/statistics.html http://bbslist.textfiles.com/support/statistics.html How many users do you think each one had? 50? 100? Of course there is some overlap and it's impossible to figure out actual unique users. Regardless, it is way more than 10K. One large BBS alone (Rusty and Edie's, which got busted for piracy in a big scandal) had over 14,000 subscribers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_n_Edie%27s_BBS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_n_Edie%27s_BBS And that last article from The Atlantic says there are 20 dialup BBSes existing when it was written in 2016, not within 2 years of the WWW arriving: "Did any direct-access, telephone-dial-up BBSes survive the internet’s proverbial asteroid? Sure enough, there are about 20 known dial-up BBSes in North America" The Internet killed BBSing, that's for sure. But that didn't happen until the mid 90's when it went mainstream.
- Maursault 4y ago
  I saw the reference, and my explanation is CompuServe, and especially Prodigy, lied, precisely for the same reasons Facebook lies, about the number of subscribers. You think any BBS users ever patronized more than one BBS? I wonder what the record is for the most logins on one BBS in a day was, but I expect the average to be close to 10 logins a day, because the day is so short, starts after work ends at bedtime, and because the bandwidth was so small, every execution took forever, so logging in and tying up a BBS for 2 hours was probably a very short session. Also, rhetorically, of the 14K alleged BBS that supposedly existed, how many of them could be considered popular among BBS users? I wonder how many would go days or weeks without a login. If you've ever browsed old newsgroups, you'd get an idea of just how many people were online. By 1983, thousands of people participated from more than 500 hosts, mostly universities and Bell Labs sites but also a growing number of Unix-related companies; the number of hosts nearly doubled to 940 in 1984.[1] The number of newsgroups grew from more than 100 as of 1983 to more than 110,000... some newsgroups receive fewer than a dozen posts per year while the most popular can get several thousand in under an hour.[2] Presumably, each newsgroup had a creator, and my hope is to give you better perspective on how many were using the Internet daily in the early 1980's, which would have only increased massively by 1990. The more than a million Internet users by 1990 figure is extremely soft. The reason the WWW exploded is probably due to Berners-Lee announcing it on Usenet. Just sayin' every Usenet user was using the Internet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Network [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup#Types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup#Types
  - icedchai 4y ago
    It's possible they exaggerated their numbers, certainly, but we can only rely on the public data. I was very active on BBSes in the early 90's. I would call generally 5 or 6 a day myself. I also ran my own, starting around 1992. I don't have any exact figures, but I remember I had roughly 300 users registered, of which about 20 to 30 called a day (I only had a single phone line.) I was a teenager at the time, and most of my users were also teens, logging in after school, from around 3 PM to midnight. There were larger systems in that area that had 8 to 10 lines, and 1000's of registered users. I remember Usenet quite well. I was active on it, starting around 1989, through a local system that had a UUCP feed. Also, not every "Usenet" user was necessarily an "Internet" (TCP/IP) user. You could receive mail and news through UUCP (batch, over dialup), without being connected to Internet with IP. More ancient history, but UUCP feeds were very common for smaller sites.

icedchai 4y ago

I will admit it difficult to get accurate numbers, but this Wikipedia article claims CompuServe had 600K and Prodigy had 450K+ subscribers in 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) It references NY Times articles that are pay walled. This graph shows roughly 12,000 BBSes existing in 1990: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/support/statistics.html http://bbslist.textfiles.com/support/statistics.html How many users do you think each one had? 50? 100? Of course there is some overlap and it's impossible to figure out actual unique users. Regardless, it is way more than 10K. One large BBS alone (Rusty and Edie's, which got busted for piracy in a big scandal) had over 14,000 subscribers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_n_Edie%27s_BBS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_n_Edie%27s_BBS And that last article from The Atlantic says there are 20 dialup BBSes existing when it was written in 2016, not within 2 years of the WWW arriving: "Did any direct-access, telephone-dial-up BBSes survive the internet’s proverbial asteroid? Sure enough, there are about 20 known dial-up BBSes in North America" The Internet killed BBSing, that's for sure. But that didn't happen until the mid 90's when it went mainstream.

Maursault 4y ago
I saw the reference, and my explanation is CompuServe, and especially Prodigy, lied, precisely for the same reasons Facebook lies, about the number of subscribers. You think any BBS users ever patronized more than one BBS? I wonder what the record is for the most logins on one BBS in a day was, but I expect the average to be close to 10 logins a day, because the day is so short, starts after work ends at bedtime, and because the bandwidth was so small, every execution took forever, so logging in and tying up a BBS for 2 hours was probably a very short session. Also, rhetorically, of the 14K alleged BBS that supposedly existed, how many of them could be considered popular among BBS users? I wonder how many would go days or weeks without a login. If you've ever browsed old newsgroups, you'd get an idea of just how many people were online. By 1983, thousands of people participated from more than 500 hosts, mostly universities and Bell Labs sites but also a growing number of Unix-related companies; the number of hosts nearly doubled to 940 in 1984.[1] The number of newsgroups grew from more than 100 as of 1983 to more than 110,000... some newsgroups receive fewer than a dozen posts per year while the most popular can get several thousand in under an hour.[2] Presumably, each newsgroup had a creator, and my hope is to give you better perspective on how many were using the Internet daily in the early 1980's, which would have only increased massively by 1990. The more than a million Internet users by 1990 figure is extremely soft. The reason the WWW exploded is probably due to Berners-Lee announcing it on Usenet. Just sayin' every Usenet user was using the Internet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Network [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup#Types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup#Types
- icedchai 4y ago
  It's possible they exaggerated their numbers, certainly, but we can only rely on the public data. I was very active on BBSes in the early 90's. I would call generally 5 or 6 a day myself. I also ran my own, starting around 1992. I don't have any exact figures, but I remember I had roughly 300 users registered, of which about 20 to 30 called a day (I only had a single phone line.) I was a teenager at the time, and most of my users were also teens, logging in after school, from around 3 PM to midnight. There were larger systems in that area that had 8 to 10 lines, and 1000's of registered users. I remember Usenet quite well. I was active on it, starting around 1989, through a local system that had a UUCP feed. Also, not every "Usenet" user was necessarily an "Internet" (TCP/IP) user. You could receive mail and news through UUCP (batch, over dialup), without being connected to Internet with IP. More ancient history, but UUCP feeds were very common for smaller sites.