Internet Growth (1981-1991)
RFC 1296
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RFC - Informational
(January 1992; No errata)
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2013-03-02
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RFC 1296 (Informational)
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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
Lottor [Page 1]
RFC 1296 Internet Growth (1981-1991) January 1992
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
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