ARPANET in 1969
study how to communicate in the event of a nuclear attack
TCP/IP released with UNIX in 1983
ARPANET was split up in 1983
100 networks in 1985
2,218 networks in 1990
4,904 networks in 1991
over 20,000 networks today;
15 to 35 million estimated users!
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While much of the Internet traffic travels over telephone lines, another method of communication is used. Instead of tying up a whole circuit for a single telephone conversation, many connections are interwoven by using a scheme known as packet switching. The computers on the Internet communication by using the Internet Protocol (or IP). These IP messages are broken into uniform size packets using a method known as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Each packet has a from and a to computer number (IP address) attached. The packets are interwoven and sent to their destination by computers known as routers. These routers send the packets on any convenient route. Thus the packets that compose a single message may have taken many different physical routes to get from sender to receiver! TCP specifies such things as what to do if a packet is missing and how to put the packets back together to form a complete message. Thus, the Internet communicates using what is known as TCP/IP. Wilkes uses a single telephone line from here to Scranton, but all the Internet traffic for Wilkes travels interwoven on that single physical line.
TCP/IP was included with the operating system UNIX in 1983. By including it in the operating system it was convenient for system managers to use it to connect to the (soon to be) worldwide network. The Internet had begun to grow.
ARPANET was split up in 1983 and many smaller networks took over its functions. NSFNET was created to form the backbone of the US Internet.
The growth in the Internet has been and continues to be phenomenal. The number of networks connected doubles every year. The number of computers and users increases ten-fold every year. There should be a limit (maximum number of people on the planet!), but the growth doesn't seem to be slowing.
There is survey data available showing the growth of the Internet. It is produced by Network Wizards (their name, not mine) and that the data is available on the Internet at http://www.nw.com.
| Survey Adjusted Replied
Date | Host Count Host Count To Ping*
--------+-----------------------------------
Jan 2000| 72,398,092 -
Jul 1999| 56,218,000 -
Jan 1999| 43,230,000 8,426,000
Jul 1998| 36,739,000 6,529,000
Jan 1998| 29,670,000 5,331,640 [first NEW Survey]
Jul 1997| 19,540,000 26,053,000 4,314,410 [last OLD Survey]
Jan 1997| 16,146,000 21,819,000 3,392,000
Jul 1996| 12,881,000 16,729,000 2,569,000
Jan 1996| 9,472,000 14,352,000 1,682,000
Jul 1995| 6,642,000 8,200,000 1,149,000
Jan 1995| 4,852,000 5,846,000 970,000
Jul 1994| 3,212,000 707,000
Jan 1994| 2,217,000 576,000
Jul 1993| 1,776,000 464,000
Jan 1993| 1,313,000
[* estimated by pinging a sample of all hosts]
[adjusted host count was computed by increasing the old survey host count by the percentage of domains that did not respond to the old survey method]
Produced by Network Wizards
You have permission to reproduce the publicly available Internet Domain Survey data provided that you mention the source as "Source: Internet Software Consortium (http://www.isc.org/)".
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