Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2018 January 16

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January 16

When did the internet reach one million users?

—azuki (talk · contribs · email) 10:26, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

If you haven't already done so, make sure you're familiar with the history of the internet and at least vaguely familiar with the technical details of the internet protocol, because the correct answer to your question depends a lot on the details.

To answer this question correctly, you need to recognize that the internet is simply the current, largest network that uses the internet protocol. In the very early days of networked computing, many separate networks existed, and over time - mostly throughout the 1980s, most of those networks started to use the internet protocol as their primary mode of software interconnection. Gradually, many of those networks started to combine; most of them began to honor and respect the databases managed specifically by IANA, the central database that is now generally regarded to be the canonical root of the Internet as we know it today.

Importantly, internet addresses can be allocated even if they are not used; and at the same time, because of the inherent way that internetworking works, (with things like network address translation), it is possible to have one, or a thousand, or even a billion users who all share a single address.

Our article on global internet usage has a few charts that imply the "million machine" mark was passed sometime during the late 1980s. (That chart actually counts hosts, not users). All of these articles provide overviews, and link to many research articles, explaining more detail.

The most important take-away from this should be that it is quite complicated to define the number of "users" on the internet. While it can be very trivial to use some measure as a proxy for that value - like the total number of DNS registrations, or the total number of allocated IP addresses - the technicalities of the way the internet works mean that any such statistic is really a poor approximation for "user count."

Nimur (talk) 19:26, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Data from which our article chart was constructed is now hosted at the ISC: Internet Domain Survey, July, 2017. By 1993, more than 1.3 million hosts were listed in the main DNS system; by July 1995, more than 1.1 million hosts actually responded to pings. As documented here and in this spectacular RFC1296, (published by some fine folks at my old haunt, SRI International) there are all sorts of technical problems with collecting and analyzing this data. There is strong reason to believe that by 1992, more than one million machines were actually on the internet as we know it today.

Of course, in 1992, the "world wide web" did not yet exist, and only a tiny community of users were even aware of HTTP, which is essentially the core technology that makes your web-browser possible. Internet data traffic took the form of pure text and file data, conveyed via older and more esoteric protocols, the most famous of which we now call forms of ftp, email, nntp, uucp, and gopher - and thousands of other application protocols that have been largely superseded by modern software.

When you look back at the statistics for the old internet, it's kind of nice to see that the overwhelming majority of the internet services registered in the domain name system were in the ".edu" domain; much of the rest was in the ".gov" top-level domain. Bear in mind that in the glory-days of the internet, most people interpreted use of the shared network to be "use of a Government-funded service": commercial use of the network was widely regarded to be against the rules, if not actually outright illegal. The Internet was simply a means for programmers and scientists to share technical computer data.

Nimur (talk) 00:56, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

By 1 million users, I mean people, not machines.—azuki (talk · contribs · email) 08:55, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Since people do not have individual "accounts" on the internet, I don't see how anyone can estimate the number of people who had access to the internet in its early days with any degree of accuracy. The first widely used web browser, Mosaic was not released until 1993. Before that, most people using the internet would have accessed it through multi-user minicomputers and mainframes. Gandalf61 (talk) 10:40, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm pretty certain the figure of a million people would have already been exceeded in the 1980's. But they'd only occasionally use it. It wasn't exactly easy to use, one had to do one's own routing putting in a list of ip mumbers to get anywhere and there wasn't exactly a lot of content!. Dmcq (talk) 11:03, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

I never had any trouble with ease-of-use! I frequently observe that there are many instances in which technology from 1983 was easier to use than technology today!

If I wanted to connect to the internet in the 1980s, all I had to do was swap out my CONFIG.SYS from the one that worked on the IPX games with the one that used the Modem, and reboot. That took less time than rebooting my iPhone. In actual fact, modern computer boot-up times have been getting slower at an accelerating pace. I can literally tell you that it was faster to get on the internet in 1988 than in 2018, and the games were more fun back then, too. So much for progress!

Nimur (talk) 17:37, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

I think you're reminiscing about bulletin board systems, which used phone lines and dialup modems. Lots of individuals ran BBS's on which they hosted chat boards and games. Companies also ran them, listing items for sale. As that article points out, the introduction of dialup internet access and the Mosaic web browser in 1992 led to the demise of BBS's in 1994. I think it's safe to say that the internet as we know it today, with browsing (jumping from site to site without having to dial a new server), did not exist until the early-mid 1990s. Akld guy (talk) 20:59, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

I used many networked computer systems, including the actual internet (pre-HTTP!), IPX, IBM WoW (a long-since-forgotten proprietary technology!), and various dial-up BBSes. While all the kids I knew were playing with PCJrs and Amigas and Nintendos, I had true PCs: a couple of Model 25 and Model 60s (PS/2) and a '70. Later, I even got a Sun4m. For a while, I even tried token-ring in the house! I was an early-adopter of heterogeneous computing!

Nimur (talk) 22:06, 17 January 2018 (UTC)