RFC 1296
Internet Growth (1981-1991)
Internet Growth (1981-1991) 🌈
okay bestie, this one is a whole vibe 💅 it's RFC 1296, written by M. Lottor of SRI International, from the Network Information Systems Center, and it's dated January 1992 🧚. it's categorised as informational, so it's giving "here's some info for the internet community" and not an actual standard ✨. the title block doesn't list anything it obsoletes or updates, so it's just doing its own thing 🦋
Status of this Memo 💌
this memo provides information for the internet community. it does not specify an internet standard. anyone can share it, no limits 🌸
Abstract ✨
this doc shows how the internet grew by looking at entries in the Domain Name System (DNS) and the older pre-DNS host tables 📊. DNS entries got collected by a program called ZONE, which searches the internet and pulls data from all known domains. pre-DNS host table data came off system archive tapes. the doc presents lots of stats on the number of hosts and domains 🔥
Table of Contents 📚
Introduction.................................................... 1
How ZONE Works.................................................. 2
Problems with Data Collection................................... 3
Scope of the Study.............................................. 3
N. Results...................................................... 4
N.1 Number of Internet Hosts.................................... 4
N.2 Number of Domains........................................... 6
N.3 Distribution of IP Addresses per Host....................... 7
N.4 Distribution of Hosts by Top-level Domain................... 7
N.5 Distribution of Hosts by Host Name.......................... 8
Future Issues................................................... 8
RFC References.................................................. 9
Security Considerations......................................... 9
Author's Address................................................ 9Introduction 🎀
this doc gives stats on how the internet grew by looking at the number of internet hosts and domains over a 10-year period 📈. before the DNS existed, practically every host on the internet was registered with the Network Information Center (SRI-NIC) and got an entry in the Official Host Table 🗂️. the host counts for pre-DNS years come from copies of the host table taken at selected times. the DNS got introduced around 1984, but it took almost 4 years to be fully implemented on the internet. by then though, a lot of hosts were no longer registered in the Host Table 🙈
in 1986, the ZONE (Zealot Of Name Edification) program got written 🧚. ZONE was originally meant for the host-table-to-DNS transition period. it would "walk" the DNS tree and build a host table out of everything it collected, so sites that hadn't made the DNS switch yet could still use it. but ZONE was never used for that 😭. instead, people found it super useful for collecting stats on the size of the domain system and the internet 📊
ZONE couldn't collect complete DNS data until around 1988, because early versions of BIND (the popular Unix DNS implementation) had major problems with the zone transfer function of the DNS protocol 💀. ZONE has been used in different ways ever since to collect this info. in the first few years, it made a wall-size chart of the domain tree 🖼️, but the number of domains quickly outgrew the wall and the charts got abandoned. later on, stats on the number of hosts and domains were pulled out of the resulting host table, sometimes sorted by top-level domain names or by computer system type or manufacturer.
the time to gather the data grew from hours to a whole week 😩, and the host table it produced soon hit 50 megabytes. to shrink the data, ZONE now runs in a mode that only collects host names and IP addresses, ignoring protocol, host information and MX record data. then some utilities (such as sort, uniq and grep) get groveled over the host table to make the stats needed. ZONE is currently run every 3 months at SRI 🌈
How ZONE Works 🔍
ZONE keeps a list of domains and their servers, plus a flag that says whether info for a domain was successfully loaded from one of those servers. because of another BIND bug, ZONE has to be primed with a list of all the top-level domains and their name servers 🫶. then it cycles through the domain list, trying to contact one of the servers for each domain not yet transferred. when it reaches a server (via TCP), it first sends a Start of Authority (SOA) query to make sure the server is authoritative for the domain being requested. if so, it sends a zone transfer query (AXFR) to grab all the resource records for the domain 💖
when a name server record (NS) comes in, the referenced domain and server get added to the list of domains to process. when host records (A, CNAME, HINFO, MX) come in, they get added to an in-core table of host information. the program ends when it has cycled through the entire domain list without getting any new information. then it dumps the host information table into a HOSTS.TXT format file 💾
Problems with Data Collection 😤
for various reasons, some internet sites don't allow zone transfers of their domain servers. ZONE also eventually gives up on transferring a domain after too many failures. the number of domains that couldn't be zone transferred during the 1-Jan-92 ZONE run was around 800 out of 17,000. plus, it's assumed that not every host on the internet is registered in a domain server. these problems make ZONE's stats lower than the actual amounts 📉
manual review of some of the collected data also shows a lot of random entries in the DNS 🎭. misformatted entries may cause bogus server or host records to show up. many times a server turns out not to be authoritative for the domain listed. sometimes entire domains get renamed and their old entries are left in place for a transition period, so every host in that domain ends up counted twice 👯. these problems make ZONE's results higher than the actual amounts.
manual scanning of the data shows the extra entries are insignificant compared to the missing entries we talked about earlier. so ZONE data can be viewed as the minimum number of internet hosts, not the actual figures 🧮
one final problem is expense 💸. downloading domain info from every domain on the internet makes a big pile of network traffic. it also puts extra CPU load on each domain server it has to contact. one idea is an organized effort with just one such program running on the internet at regularly scheduled intervals, so multiple data collectors don't happen 🤝
Scope of the Study 🔭
a big problem with counting hosts and domains is figuring out what the internet really is 🤔. finding host entries in the DNS doesn't necessarily mean the host can be reached from the internet. lots of companies have mail gateways between the internet and their local nets, which blocks direct access. but some of those companies advertise all their hosts, and some advertise only the gateway. are those hosts on the internet or not? 👀
furthermore, lots of domains in the DNS are just mail-forwarding (MX) entries for off-internet sites, like Usenet. are those domains really part of the internet, and should they get counted in an internet size study? 🙃
for this study, a host is defined as a [name(s),IP-address(es)] grouping discovered from the DNS. this stops a host with multiple names or addresses from getting counted more than once. but it doesn't consider whether the host is directly accessible or not. when ZONE counts the number of domains, it includes every domain referenced by an NS record in the DNS, so MX-only domain sites end up in the final results 🎯
N. Results 📊
this section presents data from SRI-NIC archive tapes from 1981 to 1986, plus stats gathered by ZONE runs from 1986 to 1992 💜
N.1 Number of Internet Hosts 🖥️
the chart below shows the number of IP hosts on the internet. these are hosts with at least one IP address assigned. data was collected by ZONE except where noted. the next two sections are graphs of the data in this chart 🌈
Date Hosts
08/81 213 Host table #152
05/82 235 Host table #166
08/83 562 Host table #300
10/84 1,024 Host table #392
10/85 1,961 Host table #485
02/86 2,308 Host table #515
11/86 5,089
12/87 28,174
07/88 33,000
10/88 56,000
01/89 80,000
07/89 130,000
10/89 159,000
10/90 313,000
01/91 376,000
07/91 535,000
10/91 617,000
01/92 727,000 Number of Internet Hosts (linear)
800|
780|
760|
740| *
720|
700|
680| .
660|
640|
620|
600| T *
580| h
560| o
540| u
520| s *
500| a
480| n .
460| d
440| s
420| .
400| o
380| f
360| *
340| H .
320| o
300| s *
280| t
260| s .
240| .
220| .
200| .
180| .
160|
140| *
120| *
100| ..
80| *
60| .
40| *
20| ..*...*
0|...*....*......*......*.....*.*....*...
-------------------------------------------------------------------
8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 9 9 9
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2
Date
"*" = data point, "." = estimateN.1 Number of Hosts (continued) ✨
okay so this graph is a linear plot of the number of Internet hosts 📈💖
Number of Internet Hosts (logarithmic)
| 1000000
| *.*
| ..*.*..*
| ...
| 100000 ..**
| *.*
H | ...*
o | .*
s | 10000 ..
t | ..
s | ....*
| ...*.*
1000| ...*..
| ...
| ...*
| ..*....*...
100|.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 9 9 9
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2
Date
"*" = data point, "." = estimateand this one is a logarithmic plot of the number of Internet hosts 🌈🦋
N.2 Number of Domains ✨
bestie, this chart shows the number of domains in the Internet Domain Name System as collected by ZONE 🌸 the growth is literally iconic 🔥
Date Domains
07/88 900
10/88 1,280
01/89 2,600
07/89 3,900
10/89 4,800
10/90 9,300
01/91 11,200
07/91 16,000
10/91 18,000
01/92 17,000N.3 Distribution of IP Addresses per Host 🧚
this chart shows how many hosts have how many IP addresses 👀 the data was collected on 1-Jan-92, and only the first 10 entries are shown, so no spoilers for the rest 🙈
Addresses Hosts
1 715143
2 9015
3 1027
4 556
5 314
6 213
7 100
8 85
9 58
10 71N.4 Distribution of Hosts by Top-level Domain 🌍
this chart shows the number of hosts per top-level domain (top 40 only) on 1-Jan-92 💅 the percentage listed is the increase since 1-Oct-91. big variations are probably due to problems and variations in the collection process, so these figures are not meant to be authoritative, but they serve as reasonable estimates 🫶
243020 edu 13% 13011 fr 4% 1791 dk 4% 357 be -5%
181361 com 12% 12770 nl 21% 1662 es 15% 334 gr 14%
46463 gov 13% 12647 ch 10% 1506 kr 9% 308 br 26%
31622 au 19% 11994 fi 15% 1111 nz -16% 284 mx -5%
31016 de 20% 10228 no 9% 1016 tw n/a 207 is 0%
27492 mil 26% 8579 jp 6% 929 za n/a 146 pl 97%
27052 ca 22% 4109 net -49% 784 pt n/a 127 us 25%
19117 org 10% 3324 at 19% 484 sg 251% 25 tn 0%
18984 uk 139% 2719 it 197% 448 hk 78% 24 hu 71%
18473 se 34% 2020 il 14% 374 ie -7% 6 arpa 0%N.5 Distribution of Hosts by Host Name 💜
this chart shows the distribution of hosts by their host name on 1-Jan-92 🎀 the host name is defined to be the first part of a fully qualified domain name. only the top 100 names are shown, so these are the main characters 👑
384 venus 204 mac4 172 mac9 155 pollux 138 chaos
356 pluto 201 hobbes 172 mac11 155 frodo 136 bart
323 mars 201 hermes 170 mac8 153 helios 135 pc5
288 jupiter 198 thor 169 phoenix 152 mac17 135 larry
286 saturn 198 sirius 169 mac12 151 vega 135 cs
285 pc1 196 gw 169 hal 151 mac18 133 odin
282 zeus 195 calvin 168 snoopy 150 falcon 131 tiger
262 iris 194 mac5 168 mac13 150 bach 131 sparky
260 mercury 191 mac10 167 mac15 146 castor 131 ariel
259 mac1 190 fred 167 mac14 145 sol 130 sneezy
258 orion 189 titan 167 grumpy 145 dopey 128 mac
254 mac2 189 pc3 163 gandalf 144 mac20 127 sun1
240 newton 186 opus 162 pc4 144 mac19 127 rocky
234 neptune 186 mac6 160 uranus 142 spock 126 pc6
233 pc2 185 charon 159 mac16 142 euler 125 hydra
224 gauss 185 apollo 158 sleepy 141 mickey 125 homer
222 eagle 179 mac7 158 io 141 atlas 124 isis
213 mac3 179 athena 157 earth 140 maxwell 123 moe
209 merlin 177 alpha 156 europa 140 happy 123 delta
207 cisco 172 mozart 155 rigel 140 doc 122 pc10Future Issues 🔮
okay, the future is giving major plot twist energy 😭 ZONE currently runs on a DECsystem-20 and is written in assembler. the amount of data is quickly reaching the limits of the DEC-20 section address space, and the hardware's ability to survive gets slimmer each day 💀 ZONE assembles all its data in core before dumping it to disk. the implementation does this so it can match host nicknames with official names before dumping complete host records. sometimes a nickname can be in a different domain than the official name, which complicates simpler methods 🙃
a new version of ZONE needs to be written to run on a modern computer system ✨ a completely new architecture should be designed to handle the enormous amount of data collected and expected in the future 🚀 data should be kept on disk so that a system crash will not wipe out days of collection 🫠 multiple zone transfers could be occurring in parallel to reduce the time needed for data gathering 🏃♀️
a new ZONE might run continuously, cycling through the domain system on a cycle lasting weeks to a month, updating a local database with statistics collected for each domain 💖 in this way, current statistics on the size of the Internet would always be known 🌟 the resulting database may also be useful for other network information services 🧚
RFC References 📚
Libes, D., "Choosing a Name for Your Computer", RFC 1178, Integrated Systems Group/NIST, August 1990. (Also FYI 5.)
Mockapetris, P., "Domain Names - Implementation and Specification", RFC 1035, USC/Information Sciences Institute, November 1987.
Mockapetris, P., "Domain names - Concepts and Facilities", RFC 1034, USC/Information Sciences Institute, November 1987.
Lazear, W., "MILNET Name Domain Transition", RFC 1031, Mitre, November 1987.
Harrenstien, K. Stahl, M., and J. Feinler, "DoD Internet Host Table Specification", SRI, October 1985.
Postel, J., "Domain Name System Implementation Schedule - Revised", RFC 921, USC/Information Sciences Institute, October 1984.
Security Considerations 🔐
ngl, this one is short and sweet 🥹 security issues are not discussed in this memo. so if you're looking for the security tea, it's not in here, bestie 🙈
Author's Address 💌
Mark K. Lottor
SRI International
Network Information Systems Center
333 Ravenswood Avenue, EJ282
Menlo Park, CA 94025
EMail: mkl@nisc.sri.com📦 where this page comes from
- ietf: rfc1296 1992-01
- 💖 girlified by claude-haiku-5-5 on : a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms