Internet Growth (1981-1991)
Measuring how the Internet grew from 213 hosts in 1981 to over 700,000 in 1992
Lottor, M., "Internet Growth (1981-1991)", RFC 1296, DOI 10.17487/RFC1296, January 1992, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1296>.
@misc{rfc1296,
series = {Request for Comments},
number = 1296,
howpublished = {RFC 1296},
publisher = {RFC Editor},
doi = {10.17487/RFC1296},
url = {https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1296},
author = {M. Lottor},
title = {{Internet Growth (1981-1991)}},
pagetotal = 9,
year = 1992,
month = jan,
} RFC text
Contents
Network Working Group M. Lottor
Request for Comments: 1296 SRI International
Network Information Systems Center
January 1992
Internet Growth (1981-1991)
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does
not specify an Internet standard. Distribution of this memo is
unlimited.
Abstract
This document illustrates the growth of the Internet by examination
of entries in the Domain Name System (DNS) and pre-DNS host tables.
DNS entries are collected by a program called ZONE, which searches
the Internet and retrieves data from all known domains. Pre-DNS host
table data were retrieved from system archive tapes. Various
statistics are presented 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................................................ 9
Introduction
This document provides statistics on the growth of the Internet by
examining the number of Internet hosts and domains over a 10-year
period. Before the Domain Name System was established, practically
all hosts on the Internet were registered with the Network
Information Center (SRI-NIC) and entries were placed in the Official
Host Table for each one. Data on the number of hosts for pre-DNS
years comes from copies of the host table at selected times. The DNS
system was introduced around 1984 but took almost 4 years before it
was fully implemented on the Internet. However, by this time many
hosts were no longer registered in the Host Table.
In 1986, the ZONE (Zealot Of Name Edification) program was written.
ZONE was originally intended to be used during the host-table-to-DNS
transition period. ZONE would "walk" the DNS tree and build a host
table of all the information it collected. This host table could
then be used by sites that had not yet made the DNS transition.
However, ZONE was never used for this purpose. Instead, it was found
to be useful for collecting statistics on the size of the domain
system and the Internet.
ZONE could not collect complete data on the DNS 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 varying ways ever since to collect
this information. In the first few years, it was used to produce a
wall-size chart of the domain tree. However, the number of domains
quickly outgrew the size of the wall and the charts were abandoned.
In later years, statistics on the number of hosts and domains were
extracted from the resulting host table, sometimes categorizing data
based on top-level domain names or on computer system type or
manufacturer.
The time to gather the data also grew from hours to a week, and the
size of the host table produced soon reached 50 megabytes. In order
to reduce the amount of data collected, ZONE is now run in a mode
collecting only host names and IP addresses, ignoring protocol, host
information and MX record data. The host table is then groveled over
by some utilities (such as sort, uniq and grep) to produce the
statistics required. ZONE is currently run every 3 months at SRI.
How ZONE Works
ZONE maintains a list of domains and their servers and a flag
indicating whether information for a domain has been successfully
loaded from one of the servers. Because of another bug in BIND, ZONE
must be primed with a list of all the top-level domains and their
name servers. It then cycles through the domain list, attempting to
contact one of the servers for each domain not yet transferred. When
a server is contacted (via TCP), a Start of Authority (SOA) query is
first sent to make sure the server is authoritative for the domain
being requested. If so, then a zone transfer query (AXFR) is sent to
request all the resource records for the domain to be retrieved.
When a name server record (NS) is received, the referenced domain and
server are added to the list of domains to process. When host
records (A, CNAME, HINFO, MX) are received, they are added to an in-
core table of host information. The program ends when it has cycled
through the entire list of domains without receiving any new
information. It then dumps the table of host information to a
HOSTS.TXT format file.
Problems with Data Collection
For various reasons, some Internet sites do not allow zone transfers
of their domain servers. ZONE also eventually gives up trying to
transfer a domain after too many failures. The number of domains
that could not be zone transferred during the 1-Jan-92 ZONE run was
around 800 out of 17,000. Additionally, it is assumed that not all
hosts on the Internet are registered in a domain server. These
problems cause the statistics gathered by ZONE to be lower than the
actual amounts.
Manual review of some of the data collected by ZONE also shows a lot
of random entries in the DNS. Misformatted entries may cause bogus
server or host records to appear. Many times a server is found to
not be authoritative for the domain listed. Sometimes entire domains
are renamed and their old entries left in place for a transition
period, thus causing each host within that domain to be counted
twice. These problems cause the results of ZONE to be higher than
the actual amounts.
Manual scanning of the data indicates that the additional entries are
insignificant compared to the missing entries discussed earlier.
ZONE data can thus be viewed as the minimum number of Internet hosts,
and not the actual figures.
A final problem with data collection is that of expense. Downloading
domain information from every domain on the Internet generates a
large amount of network traffic. It also puts an extra CPU load on
each domain server it must contact. An organized effort might be
considered to have only one such program doing this on the Internet
at regularly scheduled intervals to keep the problem of multiple data
collectors from occurring.
Scope of the Study
A problem with counting hosts and domains on the Internet is defining
what the Internet really is. Finding host entries in the DNS does
not necessarily indicate that the host is reachable from the
Internet. Many companies have mail gateways between the Internet and
their local nets, thus disallowing direct access. However, some of
these companies advertise all their hosts, and some advertise only
the gateway. Are these hosts on the Internet or not?
Furthermore, many domains in the DNS are just mail-forwarding (MX)
entries for off-Internet (such as Usenet) sites. Are these domains
really part of the Internet and should they be counted in an Internet
size study?
For the purposes of this study, a host has been defined as a
[name(s),IP-address(es)] grouping discovered from the DNS. This
prevents us from counting a host with multiple names or addresses
more than once. However, this does not consider whether the host is
directly accessible or not. When ZONE counts the number of domains
it includes all domains referenced by an NS record in the DNS, thus
including MX-only domain sites in the final results.
N. Results
This section presents data from archive tapes of SRI-NIC from 1981 to
1986, and statistics gathered by runs of ZONE 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 following 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, "." = estimate
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, "." = estimate
This graph is a logarithmic plot of the number of Internet hosts.
N.2 Number of Domains
This chart shows the number of domains existing in the Internet
Domain Name System as collected by ZONE.
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 17,000
N.3 Distribution of IP Addresses per Host
This chart shows how many hosts have how many IP addresses. This
data was collected on 1-Jan-92 and only the first 10 entries are
shown.
Addresses Hosts
1 715143
2 9015
3 1027
4 556
5 314
6 213
7 100
8 85
9 58
10 71
N.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. Large variations are probably due to problems and variations
in the collection process; these figures are not meant to be
authoritative, but 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.
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 pc10
Future Issues
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 in order to be able to
match host nicknames with official names before dumping complete host
records. Sometimes a nickname can be in a different domain than the
official name, complicating 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
Security issues are not discussed in this memo.
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
AI ELI5
On this page
§1Counting Internet Hosts Over a Decade
This RFC documents the growth of the Internet from 1981 through 1991 by examining how many hosts and domains existed at various points in time. For the early years before the Domain Name System (DNS) existed, data came from archived copies of the official host table maintained by the Network Information Center at SRI. After DNS was introduced around 1984, a program called ZONE was used to collect data by querying domain servers directly.
The study is valuable because it provides the first systematic record of Internet growth during its critical early years, showing how the network expanded from a small academic system to a much larger commercial and institutional infrastructure.
The paper tracks how many computers were connected to the Internet by counting them in two ways: before DNS (by reading old record books) and after DNS (by asking domain servers). It shows the Internet grew really fast, especially after 1988.
§2The ZONE Program: How Data Was Collected
The ZONE (Zealot Of Name Edification) program was written in 1986 to help sites transition from the old host table system to DNS. Instead of being used for that purpose, it became useful for collecting statistics. ZONE works by connecting to domain name servers and asking them to transfer their complete zone data using the standard DNS zone transfer mechanism (AXFR). When it receives a name server record (NS), it adds that domain to a list to process next. When it receives host records (A, CNAME, HINFO, MX), it stores the host information in memory.
Over time, ZONE became the primary tool for measuring Internet size. Initially it produced massive wall-size charts of the domain tree, but as domains grew, it was modified to collect only the essential information: host names and IP addresses. By 1992, ZONE was run every three months at SRI to produce updated statistics.
ZONE is like a robot that calls up every domain server and says: 'Please give me the complete list of computers in your domain.' It stores all that information and counts how many unique computers it found.
§3Data Collection Limitations
The statistics collected by ZONE are not perfect. Some sites refuse to allow zone transfers of their domain servers, so those hosts are never counted. In the January 1, 1992 run, ZONE failed to retrieve data from about 800 out of 17,000 domains. Additionally, not all Internet hosts are registered in DNS; many sites keep local machines off the global registry. For these reasons, the ZONE numbers represent a minimum count of actual Internet hosts.
However, some over-counting also occurs. DNS data contains random misformatted entries, servers that claim authority for domains they do not actually manage, and hosts in domains that were renamed and left with old entries. Manual review suggests the over-counting is less significant than the under-counting, so ZONE data is considered a reasonable lower bound on the true Internet size.
ZONE can't see every computer: some sites hide theirs, and some mistakes in DNS make it look like there are more than there really are. But the hidden ones are more of a problem than the wrong ones, so the numbers are probably a bit too low.
§4The Dramatic Growth
The data reveals explosive growth in Internet size. In August 1981, there were 213 hosts. By February 1986, that had grown to 2,308 hosts, representing a roughly five-fold increase over five years. Then growth accelerated dramatically. By November 1986, just nine months later, there were 5,089 hosts. One year later in December 1987, there were 28,174 hosts.
The most dramatic growth came after 1988, when ZONE could finally collect complete data due to fixes in the BIND DNS implementation. From 1988 onward, growth was nearly exponential: 33,000 hosts in July 1988, 80,000 in January 1989, 313,000 in October 1990, and finally 727,000 hosts by January 1992. The numbers roughly doubled every year for the final four years measured.
The Internet stayed tiny for the first five years, then started growing faster. From 1988 onward, it doubled in size roughly every year. In just four years it went from 30,000 computers to 700,000.
§5Distribution Patterns in the Data
Beyond total counts, the RFC breaks down how hosts and domains were distributed. Most domains were in the .edu domain (243,020 hosts as of January 1992), followed by .com (181,361), .gov (46,463), and national domains like .au (Australia, 31,622) and .de (Germany, 31,016). The .org and .net domains contained fewer hosts by this date. Growth rates varied by domain: military (.mil) grew 26% in just three months, while .net actually shrunk 49%, likely due to reorganizations.
The data also shows that most hosts had exactly one IP address (715,143 hosts), while a small fraction had multiple addresses for redundancy or load balancing. Common host names reveal the Unix tradition of naming computers after planets, mythological figures, and cartoon characters: Venus, Pluto, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn led the list, along with hundreds of hosts named Mac (with numbers), and other creative names like Hobbes, Gandalf, and Spock.
The breakdown shows which parts of the Internet grew fastest: colleges dominated, then companies, then government. Most computers had one name, and people liked naming them after planets and cartoon characters.