[DanBC]

This is a great question and if I had some way of boosting it I would.

The costs of getting online with these services was pretty high.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3087928

Compuserve, charging $11 per hour, had "more than 250,000 subscribers".

Delphi, charging $6 per hour had a loyal but small (less than 10,000 users) following.

$11 in 1988 is about $23 today.

[ramk]

Yes, they sound very expensive! As I understand, even earlier than that there were Time-Sharing computing businesses in the 60s and early 70s that charged per-hour for computing time which were expensive. I guess we have come a full circle now with cloud computing though the modern ones are comparatively less expensive.