Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ncis.tis.llnl.gov!mcb
From: mcb@ncis.tis.llnl.gov (Michael C. Berch)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Size of the Internet vs. UUCP net
Summary: (was Re: mail headers)
Message-ID: <163@ncis.tis.llnl.gov>
Date: 27 Apr 89 20:46:39 GMT
References: <1989Apr24.203137.5835@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: mcb@ncis.tis.llnl.gov (Michael C. Berch)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore CA
Lines: 35

In <1989Apr24.203137.5835@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
> [...]
> And of course, you Internet folks wouldn't even *consider* accepting some
> of the things that make life easier for us uucp folks, in return for all
> the extra connectivity *you* now have, even though we are (by some measures
> at least) the larger community.  Heavens no.  We all know that the Internet
> is divinely ordained, and all others are inferior heathens.  The fact that
> the Internet is the smaller of the two groups is totally irrelevant, because
> the Internet way of doing things is the One True Way that all should follow.

Henry, you're usually 100% right on in these matters, but my
understanding is that the UUCP network is *way* smaller than the
Internet, possibly up to an order of magnitude smaller.

The figure I got from the INTEROP '88 Conference (September 1988) was
that the *known* connected Internet consists of about 56,000 hosts.
Informal estimates by people I know who are involved with the
Internet Advisory Board and Internet Experimental Task Force put the
number at more like 80,000-100,000.  This is for *connected* sites.
If you add all the hosts that are connected by mail relays (other than
UUCP forwarding), or that are on non-connected networks, but still use
TCP/IP internally and SMTP (RFC-821) for mail transport and RFC822 for
mail message format, the number would swell past 200,000.

Contrast this with the estimated size of the UUCP network, which is
somewhere around 20,000 (the UUCP Map has about 15,000, right, plus a
fudge factor of 33%).  Subtract from that number the sites in the UUCP
Network that are also Internet sites or site gateways (that use
RFC821/822) and the relative sizes bewcome more clear.

Its pioneering history notwithstanding, I believe that in 1989 the
original V7 UUCP mail format is really not much more than a footnote.

Michael C. Berch  
mcb@ncis.llnl.gov / uunet!ncis.llnl.gov!mcb