DNS growth

One measure of the growth of the Internet is the growth in the number of hosts and domains. Before the domain name system was invented and deployed, people used copies of a table listing hosts and their IP addresses. The host table grew slowly at first: 
        08/81              213         Host table #152
        05/82              235         Host table #166
        08/83              562         Host table #300
        10/84            1,024         Host table #392
        10/85            1,961         Host table #485
        02/86            2,308         Host table #515
but, once the Internet began to grow, the host table became impossible to maintain, and the domain name system was invented and deployed. As shown here, the number of domains grew rapidly: 
        Date           Domains

        07/88              900
        10/88            1,280
        01/89            2,600
        07/89            3,900
        10/89            4,800
        10/90            9,300
        01/91           11,200
        07/91           16,000
        10/91           18,000
        01/92           17,000

This chart shows the number of hosts per top-level domain (top 40
only) on 1-Jan-92.  The percentage listed is the increase since 1-
Oct-91.  Large variations are probably due to problems and variations
in the collection process; these figures are not meant to be
authoritative, but serve as reasonable estimates.

   243020 edu 13%     13011 fr    4%     1791 dk   4%     357 be  -5%
   181361 com 12%     12770 nl   21%     1662 es  15%     334 gr  14%
    46463 gov 13%     12647 ch   10%     1506 kr   9%     308 br  26%
    31622 au  19%     11994 fi   15%     1111 nz -16%     284 mx  -5%
    31016 de  20%     10228 no    9%     1016 tw  n/a     207 is   0%
    27492 mil 26%      8579 jp    6%      929 za  n/a     146 pl  97%
    27052 ca  22%      4109 net -49%      784 pt  n/a     127 us  25%
    19117 org 10%      3324 at   19%      484 sg 251%      25 tn   0%
    18984 uk 139%      2719 it  197%      448 hk  78%      24 hu  71%
    18473 se  34%      2020 il   14%      374 ie  -7%       6 arpa 0%
To put this growth in perspective, check out Network Wizard's estimate of the current host count.

These figures are from RFC 1296, Internet Growth (1981-1991), Mark Lottor, Stanford Research Institute, January 1992.

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