[ih] how big was the host file

[Brian E Carpenter]

Yes, and the ones I found were augmented for Stanford; I didn't find raw NIC files. Maybe they are somewhere.

Regards
   Brian

On 06-Feb-20 13:52, Joseph Touch wrote:
> FWIW - the host file was only for off-site systems; it was (AFAICT typically) augmented with the local list of hosts. At some places, ihis was fairly large as well.
> 
> Joe
> 
>> On Feb 5, 2020, at 2:15 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>> A little Google work got me:
>>
>> https://www.saildart.org/allow/HOSTS.TXT[HST,NET]22
>> June 1985, 1528 hostnames.
>>
>> https://www.saildart.org/allow/HOSTS.TXT[HST,NET]25
>> December 1986, 4480 hostnames.
>>
>> https://www.saildart.org/allow/HOSTS.TXT[HST,NET]27
>> May 1987, 5343 hostnames.
>>
>> https://www.saildart.org/allow/HOSTS.TXT[HST,NET]29
>> November 1988, 7083 hostnames.
>>
>> Compare these to the RFC1296 size estimates of the Internet:
>>
>> 1985: 1961 nodes
>> 1986: 5089
>> 1987: 28174
>> 1988: 56000
>>
>> In other words, the NIC table was overwhelmed by growth by 1986 and its size had ceased to matter by then. From those numbers, it looks as if DNS superseded hosts.txt in practice around mid-1986. Read the introductory text of RFC1296 for more.
>>
>> Regards
>>   Brian Carpenter
>>
>> On 06-Feb-20 09:53, Michael Kjörling via Internet-history wrote:
>>> On 5 Feb 2020 20:33 +0000, from internet-history at elists.isoc.org (Jacques Latour via Internet-history):
>>>> How big was the host file before the DNS came in action? 200K entries?
>>>
>>> I'm not sure, but 200K entries sounds large.
>>>
>>> RFCs 1034 and 1035 are dated November 1987. Though work began earlier,
>>> that's probably a decent approximation for when "DNS came into
>>> action".
>>>
>>> RFC 1296 (January 1992) provides some data points on Internet growth
>>> for the period 1981-1991. That one gives the number of hosts with an
>>> IP address on the Internet in December 1987 as 28,174.
>>>
>>> The next data point in that RFC is about half a year later, in July
>>> 1988, at 33,000; followed by October 1988, 56,000.
>>>
>>> Even taking into account that migrating to DNS probably wasn't
>>> instant, my guess for the size of the hosts file in late 1987 would be
>>> a lot closer to 20K entries than 200K.
>>>
>>> Extrapolating from the data in RFC 1296, the Internet would have
>>> passed 200K IP hosts some time in mid-1990, with some 85% of those
>>> (net) added post-DNS.
>>>
>>
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> 
>