[SIGCIS-Members] Was email really already 75% of ARPANET traffic by 1973?

[thomas.haigh at gmail.com]

Hello SIGCIS,

 

Our of the last unsourced footnotes for the Revised History of Modern
Computing holds a note to myself concerning a possibly exaggerated factoid
from the "Hobbes' Internet Timeline."
https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

 

According to the timeline entry for 1973: "ARPA study shows email composing
75% of all ARPANET traffic." Keep in mind that Tomlinson sent the first
network mail in 1971 and mail technologies were rather immature for the
first few years.

 

If that is true it's certainly a fact worth including in the book to
demonstrate the very rapid spread of email on the ARPANET. But "ARPANET
study" is not something I can use to confirm the original source.

 

I haven't been able to find anything so specific in Janet Abbate's book
Inventing the Internet though she features email prominently and agree that
its rise was both rapid and unexpected.  Ian Hardy's undergraduate thesis,
an early historical look at Internet email, does not include this particular
figure.
https://www.livinginternet.com/References/Ian%20Hardy%20Email%20Thesis.txt
Craig Partridge's IEEE Annals article "Technical Development of Internet
Email" didn't, on a recent skim, seem to say anything on this topic either.

 

Does anyone know where this number might be coming from? Or have a
well-sourced alternative for slightly later year like 1975 or 76?

 

Best wishes,

 

Tom

 

 

 

 

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