I've been digging up numbers over the past few years. In 1980 there were 2 million computers in the US, doubling every 2 years. By 2000, there were 168 million computers, only 6 doublings rather than the 10 the 1980 estimate would have provided. That suggests about 16 million users as of 1990, possibly 24-32 million by 1992.

As of 1995, total worldwide Internet usage (then largely in the US, though also Europe) was 16 millions. As of 2019 it's 4.5 billions.

https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm

(From an earlier HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783812)

Brian Reid's Usenet Usenet usage reports as of 1988 reported about 140k active Usenet users, from a population-with-access of about 880,000.

Usenet was small.

(Some of these stats also cited in in one of the links (which I wrote) from TFA.)

Yeah I got my first modem in 1985 (hence the username). Anyone outside of academia was all BBS, not Internet back then. I’m shocked to hear Usenet even had 140k active users in 1988.

Oh man, I had a 300 baud modem for a very short time. Then my parents found out how much it'd cost to use it (long distance to nearest BBS or provider) and they sent it back. Ugh.

I did eventually get to use a 2400 baud modem though, and even ran my own BBS for a while. Fun days.

Indeed: the entire contents of Usenet up to the 1990s, including binaries, would fit on a thumb drive.

https://ryanfb.github.io/etc/2015/02/23/early_usenet_history...

Getting it off piles of tapes and onto that thumb drive, however, was a large task:

https://www.joe0.com/2019/02/17/converting-utzoo-usenet-arch...

I think people do not appreciate just how expensive it was to get online.

In 1988 Compuserve (more than 250,000 subscribers) was charging $11 per hour, The Source charged $8 per hour, Delphi charged $6 per hour, and BIX was $9 per hour.

Eleven 1988 dollars would be about $23 today.

Long distance rates to BBS's were nasty, too. Thus the joy in finding any and all ways to get free calls. In ... 1992? i think it was I had a provider that offered dialup shell access for $8/hr on an 800 number, and that was the best legitimate price around for a good while. I built people networks off that box.

And that included intra-state long distance which could actually be even higher than inter-state calls. For quite a while I used a subscription BBS in a relatively nearby city. Phone calls were still expensive and there were all sorts of tricks/tools to minimize the time you spent online. (e.g. software that let you download new messages on specific boards and read/reply offline.)