> there used to be that `9grid' thingie (can't find much of it anymore), which 
> offered free accounts to anyone who bothered asking.
> 
> there was a public list of user accounts on some page; IIRC well over 50. some 
> had custom face(7)s.

9grid is a bit of an overloaded term, but I think you're thinking of something else
regardless. The Tokyo Inferno / Plan 9 Users Group (TIP9UG) was, until a
catastrophic hardware failure, the longest-running public Plan 9 resource, and
had the page of faces of people with accounts, which I suspect you're referring
to, on their web site. Sadly, that's gone now, but thanks to the Wayback Machine,
we can take a look at it near the failure point:
	http://web.archive.org/web/20080724201812/http://www.tip9ug.jp/who/index.html
Looks like in the neighborhood of ~150 people (of course, that has the same
problem of any web/public service, where that includes people who signed up
and never came back).

9srv.net (which I run) provides public accounts for interested folks. See the wiki
for instructions on making a request. It's not as well-developed as tip9ug was,
and we've got about a dozen users (same caveat as above), but it's growing. I
would like to do something like tip9ug's faces page, but haven't gotten there yet.

Anthony