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not2b
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6,000+, and those machines served many others (back then there were tens of thousands of machines on the Internet, but probably 10x as many that were connected to these by relays that handled email or Usenet traffic).
Well, sort of. RTM underestimated the effect of exponential growth, and thought that he would in effect have an account on all of the connected systems, without permission. He evidently didn't intend to use this power for evil, just to see if it could be done.
He did do us all a service; people back then didn't seem to realize that buffer overflows were a security risk. The model people had then, including my old boss at one of my first jobs in the early 80s, is that if you fed a program invalid input and it crashed, this was your fault because the program had a specification or documentation and you didn't comply with it.