1Source: SRI International. Note: these figures represent systems which are not only connected, but are also visible worldwide at the time of census. This census is unable to account for the many organizations which connect via a “gateway” to the Internet - such as Microsoft. Microsoft offers a prime example of huge low-side variations in this data - several thousand employees are able to regularly share e-mail with Internet users, access Usenet and FTP files. However, Microsoft contributes only a few dozen systems to the above census figures. Of the 137 countries with Internet access, only some 60 have direct connections to the Internet at this time.
2RFC 821: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, 1982, August; Postel, J.B.
3RFC 1225: Post Office Protocol: Version 3,1991, May; Rose, M.T.
4RFC 1341: MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions):Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies,1992 June; Borenstein, N.; Freed, N.
7The Internet Gopher Protocol: a Distributed Document Search and Retrieval Protocol, Spring 1992; Bob Alberti, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Mark McCahill, Daniel Torrey, University of Minnesota
8Gopher+: Proposed Enhancements to the Internet Gopher Protocol, Summer 1992; Bob Alberti, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Mark P. McCahill, Daniel Torrey, University of Minnesota
9Archie - An Electronic Directory Service for the Internet, Peter Deutsch, McGill University.
10An Executive Information System for Unstructured Files: Wide Area Information Servers, November, 1991; Brewster Kahle, Harry Morris, Franklin Davis, Kevin Teine, Clare Hart, Robin Palmer, Thinking Machines.
11HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol): A Protocol for the Retrieval and Manipulation of Textual and Hypermedia Information, Tim Berners-Lee, CERN
12Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): A Representation of Textual Information and MetaInformation for Retrieval and Interchange, Tim Berners-Lee, CERN. (Note: HTML is a variant of the ISO/SGML text markup language).
13Source: NSFNet (The National Science Foundation Network). Although this data specifically accounts for the traffic patterns on NSFNet for December 1993, this federally funded backbone is believed by most to best represent the traffic patters on the Internet as it carries such a large volume of public traffic. Note also that for purposes of this graph, all other protocols such as NFS, X Windows, and remote process execution have been eliminated to show the relative use of the “interactive” Internet protocols discussed in this memo.
15Not entirely true, in the last month, I have been pleasantly surprised in connecting to 5 Windows NT FTP servers on the Internet in the course of research.
16Windows Sockets: An Open Interface for Network Programming under Microsoft Windows Version 1.1, January 1993; Martin Hall, Mark Towfiq,Geoff Arnold, David Treadwell, Henry Sanders.
17Internet Engineering Task Force - the body of engineering professionals which define the Internet protocols.
18RFC 1055: Nonstandard for transmission of IP datagrams over serial lines: SLIP. 1988 June; Romkey, J.L.
19RFC 1331: The Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) for the Transmission of Multi-protocol Datagrams over Point-to-Point Links. 1992 May; Simpson, W.
20Note that due to limitations in the Windows-based Internet navigation tools, I generally choose to use my Sun Sparcstation to access the Internet. The Unix/X-Windows based which provides a much more mature environment for Internet navigation and information processing. As an Internet user, the Unix-centric perceptions I mention in this memo hold for myself much of the time given the present state of available technologies and tools for Windows and Windows NT.
