| >telnet and gopher were used by a few thousands servers only and were not consumer facing technologies The card catalogs at most university libraries and most libraries of any national or international importance were reachable by telnet in 1992. And I think card catalogs count as a "consumer-facing" service. The vast majority of internet client software in 1992 was text only. The first exception to this that I am aware of is the WWW, which most internet users had not started to use by the end of 1992 (email, newsgroups and ftp being the most widely used services). The way most connected to the internet or an intranet from home was by sending vt100 or similar protocol over a dial-up link -- with a Unix shell account or VMS account at the other end of the link. Repeating myself for emphasis: in 1992 most people accessing the internet from home or from a small office used a modem and IP packets did not pass over that modem link. The point of this long paragraph is that the vast majority of the machines on which these shell accounts ran were also reachable by telnet. Finally, the telnet protocol in 1992 was a "general-purpose adapter" similar to how HTTP is one today. For example, the first web page I ever visited I visited through a telnet-HTTP gateway so that I could get a taste of the new WWW thing without having to install a WWW browser. Note that this telnet-HTTP gateway is another example of a "consumer-facing" telnet server. In summary, there were probably more than a few thousand telnet servers in 1992 -- and many of them were "consumer-facing". I am almost certain there were a few million users (certainly so if we include college students who used it for a semester or so, then stopped) of the internet in 1992, and most of those users used telnet. |