From 1985 to December 1994, the Internet grew from about
200 networks to well over 45,000
and from 1,000 hosts (end-user computers) to over
four
million. About 1,000,000
of these hosts are at educational sites, 1,300,000 are commercial
sites, and about 385,000 are government/military sites, all in the
U.S. Most of the other 1,300,000 hosts are elsewhere in the world.
(See the Network Wizards domain
count.) NSFNET traffic
grew from 85 million packets in January 1988 to 86
billion packets in
November 1994. (A packet is about 200 bytes, and a byte corresponds
to one ASCII character.) This is more than a six hundred-fold
increase in only six years. The traffic on the network is currently
increasing at a rate of 6% a month. (NSFNET statistics are available
at Merit's Network Informaton
Center
.)
John Quarterman estimates that as of October 1994 there were about 8 million people directly connected to the Internet, and about 6 million more people who can access the Internet ``indirectly'' through online services. The numbers in the latter category are likely substantially larger today. Of course the total number of people who have access to the Internet via email is much larger---it may even approach the 20--30 million figures bandied about in the mass media.