The 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 o

The 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...