[ih] how big was the host file

[Jack Haverty]

IIRC, a major change in the ARPANET's limit on number of hosts was the
conversion from "32-bit leaders" to "96-bit leaders".   Each IMP could
still have up to 4 hosts, but the large leaders meant there could be
more IMPs and therefore more hosts on the ARPANET.  IIRC, that occurred
sometime in the mid-70s.

For the historians, I suspect the best authoritative source of the
timeline of changes in the ARPANET would be the various BBN QTRs, many
of which are online at DTIC.

TCP, and Port Expanders which allowed more than 4 hosts to connect to an
IMP, came much later - late 70s/early 80s.

/Jack Haverty

On 2/6/20 8:40 AM, Lars Brinkhoff via Internet-history wrote:
> Nigel Roberts wrote:
>> In 1978 MIT-AI was @O to to 134 and MIT-DM was 70.
> Those are decimal numbers.  Converted to octal, they make sense as
> host/imp numbers.  MIT-DMS is 106 and MIT-AI is 206, so they are host 1
> and 2 on IMP 6.  MIT-MULTICS was host 0, and MIT-ML was host 3.