[ih] Quick Question

[Jorge Amodio]

In the early 80's UUCP was going from mild to wild, CSNET was funded
by NSF in 1979 but it took a while to get moving, if he can get hold
of Larry Landweber he may be able to provide more specifics and
insight.

BITNET got rolling in 1981 with CUNY and YALE (little old image
attached from those days).

Besides ARPANET another contemporary network was SPAN (NASA, primarily
DECNet based), I remember reading somewhere that around those days
20,000 scientist were using it.

And you have to add some other developments such as Cyclades and JANET
in Europe, JUNET in Japan, etc.

So, hundreds sounds too low, millions too high, any number in the
10K-300K interval may sound about right, now if you are strictly
talking about CSNET and BITNET in 1980 the answer is probably very few
since they were not fully developed yet.

My .02
Jorge


On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 10:26 AM, Dave CROCKER <dhc2 at dcrocker.net> wrote:
>
>> RFC 1296 might prove of interest.
>
> ...
>>>
>>> I'm sure it was over 200, most probably10s of thousands.
>
> ...
>>>>
>>>>                How many people was connected to a network in 1980 ?
>>>> (BITNET, CSNET –just created-)...
>
>
> 1980 is an interesting year to consider.  Arguably, it defines the
> transition from a relatively pure research world for networking to the
> beginning of the production build-out, albeit often within the context of
> research.
>
> RFC 1296 is a good place to start, in terms of direct Internet host
> connections, remembering that in those days, most of those machines were
> time-sharing services.  So there is a significant multiplier for many of
> those hosts, in counting people with access.  In those days, LANs were still
> quite rare.
>
> CSNet was just getting started.  We had a small, predecessor email relaying
> service running to some Army sites that were not otherwise on the net. I
> don't remember how many sites, but the number was not huge.  I'll wave my
> hand and say that we were giving perhaps a few thousand people network mail
> access.
>
> As I recall, Bitnet, too, was just getting started and likely did not have
> much reach yet.
>
> UUCP was in mild use for email relaying.  I suspect that in 1980 it was the
> largest source of Arpanet -- remember it wasn't the formal Internet yet --
> mail from places lacking full Internet connectivity.  (Usenet as an
> integrated service was also starting at around that time.)
>
> All told, low thousands or very low tens of thousands sounds like the right
> range.
>
> For the distinctions about type of access, take a look at RFC 1775 (To Be
> "On" the Internet)
>
> d/
>
> --
>
>  Dave Crocker
>  Brandenburg InternetWorking
>  bbiw.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: bitnet.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 50168 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/attachments/20110930/b2d0071a/attachment.jpg>