[hollerith]

The Internet had more non-academic users in July 1993 than CompuServe, AOL or Prodigy. Most of those non-academic users connected "through work" (either at work or by dialing in to a pool of modems maintained by their employer).

If you remove people who connected through work from the definition of ordinary users, then AOL or Compuserve might have had more ordinary users than the Internet, but not vastly more. There were at least a dozen ISPs offering shell-account-style access to the internet in July 1993, Netcom, Best, Panix and The World being big US-based ones.

[scholia]

Depends how you define "internet users". You're certainly right if you think of email and FTP. However, online services were more widely used by ordinary Americans until they got web access ... and an awful lot of them got their first web access via AOL.

You may recall the huge impact that AOL had when it connected to the web. AOL also bought Netscape, which had been a dominant force in the early commercialization of the web (along with Windows 95), before taking over Time-Warner.

[hollerith]

There's a reason I put a date in my sentences. Yes, a lot of Americans got their first web access via AOL, but I would be shocked to learn that it was possible to browse the web via AOL in July 1993. I did not succeed in my attempt just now to find out when it became possible, but consider that AOL did not provide its users with access to Usenet until September 1993.

And consider that that in July 1993 Usenet was still much bigger and more important than the web. The web grew very quickly, but it takes a while to grow from zero users. (To help jog people's memories: Netscape Communications -- as "Mosaic Communications Corporation" -- was not founded till April 1994. Altavista opened to the public in December 1995.)

We've gone very far from the topic of this comment section.