The astonishing thing is that this could make Newsweek if there were only 15k simultaneous users. But I guess a lot of people had tried getting online as a curiosity, but there wasn't a huge concurrent load.

At the time I had a university account and was safely ensconced in my free shell account irc'ing and mud'ing all night.

And this is almost three years before the huge traffic jam that occurred when they went from pay-per-hour to unlimited: http://thisdayintechhistory.com/12/01/aol-goes-unlimited/

I bought an Earthlink software box at a computer store around 1995. Then after that I used mindspring for dial-up. Never used AOL but got tons of Cd's in the mail...

I was on CompuServe.

Me too! you should email me! 73127,[email protected]

And the thing I found amazing about compuserve email addresses that they were from the DEC program,project tuples that DEC used to identify users, and that compuserve users just slotted email addresses into things like telephone numbers where you didn't expect any relationship between what you typed and the person you connected to, of course you needed a directory for that, just like the phone book :-)