IRC and USENET are simpler than that.
"Wordperfect" as a Google Ngram term peaks in the early 1990s:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Wordperfect&ca...
Microsoft Windows 3.1 was released in 1992, selling "over a million copies" in the first two months of the year. That would an annual sales track of ~6 million or so.
In 1980 there were 2 million computers in the US, doubling every 2 years. By 2000, there were 168 million computers, only 6 doublings rather than the 10 the 1980 estimate would have provided. That suggests about 16 million users as of 1990, possibly 24-32 million by 1992.
As of 1995, total worldwide Internet usage (then largely in the US, though also Europe) was 16 millions. As of 2019 it's 4.5 billions.
https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm
That would have been the more educated, wealier, and generally professional class of users, for the most part. For better or worse, computer use has democratised tremendously. The capabilities of the typical user have all but certainly fallen correspondingly.
Just because it was a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf software package with a home-user license that any individual could buy, doesn't really mean that they were targeting the "layperson" market in the way that e.g. Windows Home Editions ever were. They were targeting professionals who had home computers, who had already learned the software due to previous corporate-sponsored training. Big difference.
The equivalent today would be the sort of software used by Hollywood screenwriters to format their scripts. Even if you buy a single-seat license of it, that's not because you're a layperson/hobbyist; that's because you're a freelance professional who works from your home-office.
Nobody is going to go from Reddit to usenet/IRC. That's a massive UX downgrade and the modern layperson isn't going to deal with that when the next Tiktok or other social media craze is a tap away.
