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

[Jean Graham]

A lot of the material circulated on early networks was pre-publication
scholarly literature. That would certainly take up a lot of network
traffic, just by its nature.

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 4:01 PM Win Treese <treese at acm.org> wrote:

> HI, Tom. Stephen Lukasik’s retrospective "Why the Arpanet Was Built” (IEEE
> Annals of the History of Computing,
> July-September 2011, pp. 4-21, vol. 33
> https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2011/03/man2011030004/13rRUxly9fL)
> says "A 1974 Mitre study of Arpanet usage showed that about three-quarters
> of the traffic was email”.
>
> It seems odd that Licklider and Vezza said a lot about email but didn’t
> include that fact in their 1978 “Applications of Information Networks”
> paper (Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 66, NO. 11, November 1978).  They
> wrote (among other statements:
>
>   "By the fall of 1973, the great effectiveness and convenience of
>    such fast, informed messages services... had been discovered by
>    almost everyone who had worked on the development of the ARPANET --
>    and especially by the then Director of ARPA, S.J. Lukasik, who soon
>    had most of his office directors and program managers communicating
>    with him and with their colleagues and their contractors via the
>    network. Thereafter, both the number of (intercommunicating)
>    electronic mail systems and the number of users of them on the
>    ARPANET increased rapidly."
>
> A Gizmodo article from 2016 (
> https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-defense-department-got-mad-at-darpa-for-creating-em-1763274070)
> has:
>
> BEGIN QUOTE
> The explosion of email was swift. In 1974, ARPA asked MITRE to study how
> the network was being used. They       were shocked to find out that
> roughly 75 percent of the net packets were for email.
>
> I reached out to Steve Lukasik, former director of ARPA during the late
> 1960s and early 1970s, who told me about the bureaucratic hurdles that the
> agency faced once they had cracked email’s technical problems. History
> books often ignore, or don’t fully appreciate, the bureaucratic hurdles
> that must be jumped to accomplish major technological feats. Al Gore didn’t
> invent the internet, for example, but without him the bureaucratic barriers
> wouldn’t have been overcome to privatize it.
>
> Email’s use of 75 percent of network traffic in 1974 “had enormous
> bureaucratic implications that were initially worrisome,” Lukasik told me.
> “DoD auditors slapped our wrist for violating DoD procedures. They said we
> had constructed a communication system, but that was the responsibility of
> the Defense Communication Agency.”
> END QUOTE
>
> I couldn’t find any actual details on the "MITRE study” beyond that. It’s
> fragmentary, but perhaps helpful.
>
> Best,
>
> Win
>
> Win Treese
> treese at acm.org
>
>
> > On Jul 29, 2020, at 1:36 AM, thomas.haigh at gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > 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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