alt Hacker NewsThat 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.
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keyliejener • 11/05/2025
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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.