[ih] Users vs Hosts on ARPANET

[John Day]

At the places like BBN or SRI, it might be very easy to tell because 
it was the employees, but I know at Illinois someone might have known 
who all was using it, but it would have been difficult.  We had 
people from several parts of physics, people from Argonne (Fermilab 
didn't exist yet), land-use planners around Chicago, energy guys 
doing the energy I/O matrix for the US economy, math, CS (some), 
chemists, economists, musicians, dancers, and I am undoubtedly 
leaving some out.

But Noel is right.  A good indicator would be an early ARPANET 
directory but I know those didn't come close to including all of the 
users.  At Illinois, it included primarily the people in our facility 
alone, which was a fraction of all of the users of our node.

Frankly, no one really paid all that much attention to it.


At 19:46 -0500 2009/11/10, Vint Cerf wrote:
>the number reached 50,000 very quickly as I recall.
>
>v
>
>On Nov 10, 2009, at 5:49 PM, Brian Dear wrote:
>
>>Most of the histories of the first 10 years of ARPANET show graphs 
>>depicting how the number of host machine connections grew year by 
>>year.   That's swell, but what I've always wondered was, how many 
>>PEOPLE used the ARPANET during those years?   That is, how many 
>>people were connected to those host machines and at what 
>>year-by-year rate did the "ARPANET population" grow?
>>
>>Anyone have any references to such data?
>>
>>- Brian
>>
>>
>>Brian Dear
>>PLATO History Project
>>La Jolla, California
>><mailto:brian at platohistory.org>brian at platohistory.org
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