gross@DCN9.ARPA (Phill Gross) (10/26/84)
I thought the message below might be of interest to arpanauts. It
originated in the 'Human-Nets digest' (which I don't read) and was
forwarded, with comments, to 'AIlist' by Ken Laws at SRI. (Law's
added comments are in square brackets.) Any comments?
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Date: Wed, 10 Oct 84 01:50:10 edt
From: bedford!bandy@mit-eddie
Subject: Net Readership
[Forwarded from the Human-Nets digest by Laws@SRI-AI.]
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 84 14:28 EDT
From: TMPLee@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA
Has anyone ever made an estimate (with error bounds) of how
many people have electronic mailboxes reachable via the
Internet? (e.g., ARPANET, MILNET, CHAOSNET, DEC ENET, Xerox,
USENET, CSNET, BITNET, and any others gatewayed that I've
probably overlooked?) (included in that of course group
mailboxes, even though they are a poor way of doing business.)
Gee, my big chance to make a bunch of order of magnitude
calculations.... [...]
USENET/DEC ENET: 10k machines, probably on the order of 40 regular
users for the unix machines and 20 for the "other" machines so that's
100k users right there.
[Rich Kulaweic (RSK@Purdue) notes 15k users on 40 Unix machines
at Purdue, with turnover of several thousand per year. -- KIL]
BITNET: something like 100 machines and they're university machines in
general, which implies that they're HEAVILY overloaded, 100-200
regular active users for each machine - 10k users.
[A news item in the latest CACM mentions 200 hosts at 60 sites,
soon to be expanded to 200 sites worldwide. A BITNET information
center is also being developed by a consortium of 500 U.S.
universities, so I expect they'll all get nodes soon. -- KIL]
Chaos: about 100-300 machines, 10 users per machine (yes, oz and ee
are heavily overloaded at times, but then there's all those unused
vaxen on the 9th floor of ne43). 1k users for chaosnet.
I think that we can ignore csnet here (they're all either on usenet or
directly on internet anyway...), so they count for zero.
ARPA/MILNET: Hmm... This one is a little tougher (I'm going to include
the 'real' internet as a whole here), but as I remember, there are
about 1k hosts. Now, some of the machines here are heavily used
(maryland is the first example that pops to mind) and some have
moderate loads (daytime - lots of free hardware at 5am!), let's say
about 40 regular users per machine -- another 10k users.
I dare not give a guesstimate for Xerox.
[Murray.PA@Xerox estimates 4000 on their Grapevine system. -- KIL]
So it's something on the order of 100k users for the community. [...]
Well, it could be 50k people, but these >are< order of magnitude
calculations...
[Mark Crispin (MRC@Score) notes that there are 10k addressable
mailboxes at Stanford, but that the number of active users is
perhaps only a tenth of this. Andy's final estimate might be
inflated or deflated by such a factor. -- KIL]
Now that I've stuck my neck out giving these estimates, I'm awaiting
for it to be chopped off.
andy beals
bandy@{mit-mc,lll-crg}
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------ag5@pucc-i (Today's Special) (10/27/84)
<<let's fuel the fire here...>>
Uh, we forgot one BIG sector of Internet users (or, perhaps
maybe these folks aren't considered Internet users... let me know).
IBM's internal net, VNET (which is accessible through BITNET), has
over 1500 hosts worldwide... Surely this accounts for a *large* number
of users...
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Henry C. Mensch | User Confuser | Purdue University User Services
{ihnp4|decvax|ucbvax|purdue|sequent|inuxc|uiucdcs}!pur-ee!pucc-i!ag5
{allegra|cbosgd|hao|harpo|seismo|intelca|masscomp}!pur-ee!pucc-i!ag5
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"Hit me with your laser beam!"schoff@cadtroy.UUCP (Martin Lee Schoffstall) (10/30/84)
How about Mailnet? They supposedly have 475 universities and colleges.
Here at RPI the access is through a 3081K with over 200 displays and
a user population of in excess of 3000. Admittedly though they have
initially restricted access to faculty and staff. Their gateway is
MIT-MULTICS.ARPA.
marty
cadmus!schoff@seismo.ARPA
{linus,bbncca,wivax,seismo}!cadmus!schoffag5@pucc-k (Leo Buscaglia) (11/03/84)
<<>>
I got a response from this posting asking the particulars on how
to post mail from the Internet to VNET. Unfortunately the header from
that mail which I received has produced an unintelligible address which
neither ARPA nor UUCP likes..
If that person would again mail to me at the UUCP address below
(don't use the reply option on your news-reading-software; it tends to
botch things up at this end), I will be glad to answer the query.
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Henry C. Mensch | User Confuser | Purdue University User Services
{ihnp4|decvax|ucbvax|purdue|sequent|inuxc|uiucdcs}!pur-ee!pucc-i!ag5
{allegra|cbosgd|hao|harpo|seismo|intelca|masscomp}!pur-ee!pucc-i!ag5
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"It's a radio for deaf-mutes!"eugene@ames.UUCP (Eugene Miya) (11/09/84)
My copy of DDN directory has about 24 entries per page and this comes
to about 13,900 people in the MILnet/ARPAnet domain.
--eugene miya
NASA Ames Res. Ctr.
{hplabs,ihnp4,dual,hao,vortex}!ames!aurora!eugene
emiya@ames-vmsb.ARPA