The 10% number is completely made up. According to Paul Graham, "I was there when this statistic was cooked up, and this was the recipe: someone guessed that there were about 60,000 computers attached to the Internet, and that the worm might have infected ten percent of them."

▲

nakamoto_damacy 2 days ago | parent [-]

That figure is probably UUCP mostly not live connected hosts. I could be wrong, but 60k hosts that you could telnet to sounds like a lot of ducking hosts back then. I was there too, in my late teens. God bless PG.

▲

wkat4242 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah and a 'host' back then wasn't a cheap PC or something, they tended to be $30000 workstations or $300000 servers. At tech companies and Universities only, and mostly in the US. 60k sounds like a lot for those days. It grew massively from the early 90s.

Even UUCP was still really fringe and those weren't actually connected hosts on tcp/ip. They had their own dialup mail exchange protocol similar to fidonet.

▲

rootusrootus 2 days ago | parent [-]

Those were the days. I still remember my fido number. And I still remember just how painful it was to get uucp working properly. Ugh. But my mother had an email address years before any of her contemporaries. Being a geek was fun then.

▲

wkat4242 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah I even had multiple fido point numbers. Because there were some alternative networks. I kinda miss it.

I also used uucp for a few years though it soon got replaced with full internet. We were bit behind in Europe and we caught up fast. In the beginning I also had to use bang paths to avoid some misconfiguration upstream. Fido was actually better at this and the tool chain much more user-friendly. Though you still needed multiple. There was one to do the dial up and one to sort the retrieved mail, a "tosser" :)

▲

cogogo a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember my elementary school librarian had some kind of networked computer a touch later, 90-92 timeframe. She tried to explain what email was to me and I still remember being super confused. Think she even showed me on screen my I still did not get it.

	▲	donohoe a day ago \| parent [-]
		It’s very brave to admit when something confounds you. Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email If that’s too much, think of the internet as a series of tubes, and email as a digital boomerang that returns with an out-of-office reply attached.

▲

angled a day ago | parent | prev [-]

foo@baz!quux, those were the days.

	▲	euroderf a day ago \| parent [-]
		What, no path thru seismo ?

▲

keyliejener a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]