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."
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.
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.
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.
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" :)
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.
