Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!husc6!ukma!rutgers!apple!motcsd!xdos!doug
From: doug@xdos.UUCP (Doug Merritt)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Size of the Internet vs. UUCP net
Message-ID: <284@xdos.UUCP>
Date: 13 May 89 15:14:00 GMT
References: <1989Apr24.203137.5835@utzoo.uucp> <163@ncis.tis.llnl.gov> <552@aurora.AthabascaU.CA>
Reply-To: doug@xdos.UUCP (Doug Merritt)
Organization: Hunter Systems, Mountain View CA (Silicon Valley)
Lines: 39

In article <552@aurora.AthabascaU.CA> lyndon@auvax.UUCP (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes:
>short. Nearly every map entry I'm aware of (for Alberta anyway) hides
>*at* *least* three additional machines behind it.

Definitely. At my last company, a leaf node at a very small company,
there were about 6 machines hiding behind the map entry (not including
a dozen more that no one bothered to setup news or mail on; dark ages).

Currently I'm again at a very small company, and again a news leaf;
we have maybe 10 serious Unix systems currently accessible to uucp
mail from the net, and maybe another 20 machines that no one uses for
mail (e.g. 386 MSDOS systems; there are about twice as many machines as
employees here (!), but I would only count the ones people actually read
mail on).

I would guess that *most* of the leafs on the net are small organizations
like this, with 3-20 (median 6???) machines, and that as a rule of thumb,
the number of hidden systems grows with the connectivity indicated in the
map entry. Some gross estimate of total number of uucp systems could be
made based on a guess about the distribution of these numbers.

>there is no practical way to determine the number of machines on each of
>these "networks."

How about encouraging people to estimate this in their published map
entry? And encouraging those who prefer not to publish to at least
privately email the figure to the mapping project? Along with estimated
total number of people accessible by mail. Should be some interesting numbers.

Oh yeah...don't forget international sites; ATT for instance has many systems
and people in Japan you can reach by mail, but you'd never know that by map
entries.  Phone costs are too high for any of them to participate in news,
so they're pretty low profile.
	Doug
-- 
Doug Merritt		{pyramid,apple}!xdos!doug	doug@xdos.com
Member, Crusaders for a Better Tomorrow		Professional Wildeyed Visionary

"Of course, I'm no rocket scientist" -- Randell Jesup, Capt. Boinger Corps