| > You can just look at pure user counts and see they are more usable/accessible overall User counts are a poor comparison when you consider how much the pool of potential users has grown. As points to reference, Microsoft Windows 95 sold 7 million copies in its first 5 weeks so call it ~73 million copies sold the first year.[0] 20 years later in 2015, Samsung, Apple, and Huawei combined sold ~73 million phones across 5 models.[1] Windows 10, released that same year, had Microsoft shooting for it installed on 1 billion devices within 3 years.[2] 2005 estimates 1 billion (or 16% of the global population) online. 2020 estimates 4.9 billion (or 63% of the global population) online.[3] A million users used to be a big deal not that long ago.[4] Not that I disagree we've gotten better at some things but Outlook Express (newsgroups) and mIRC (irc) seemed plenty accessible to millions of non-technical users. [0]: https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/launch-of-windows-95... - when searching for a number I saw first-year estimates at ~40 million [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... [2]: They made it in 5, https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/16/21116762/microsoft-window... [3]: https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2021/11/15/inte... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e0n7vTLz1U |
This was my experience as well decades ago. Unfortunately, people claim that Usenet and/or irc are to technical for the average user to figure out. I guess the skill level of the average user has gone down in the interim.