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Summary: 50
By any metric, the Internet has
scaled remarkably--from four nodes in 1969
to an estimated 40 million hosts today. This
reflects a sustained growth rate over three
decades of more than 80% per year, during
continuous service. In system growth, the
Internet has been matched only by the major
infrastructure projects of the early 1900s: the
electric power grid, the automobile, and the
telephone network.
The Internet's scalability is the result of the
single-minded focus of its designers on robust-
ness and adaptability.1
Over the past three
decades, the Internet has added support for
automatic name translation, hierarchical rout-
ing, congestion avoidance, dynamic address
assignment, multicast, mobility, and most
recently, attempts at real-time support. Future
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