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 ge

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.