Five facts about the growth of the World Wide Web

This information was liberated from a Web page called (appropriately) "Wow, It's Big!" by Matthew Gray (mkgray@mit.edu).
  1. The total amount of Web usage that crossed the NSFnet backbone in 1992 was about 500 megabytes. That's a lot of data- -about 500,000 pages of text or 1,000 fairly large images. Though, on physical disk, I can easily carry that much information in one hand. Remember, this only counts data that goes over the NSFnet. Lots of other data never hits the backbone so doesn't get counted in this figure.
  2. The total usage for the three month period of January through March 1993 is about 5 gigabytes. That's 10 times as much as all of 1992. That's quite a lot of physical disk space. I could probably still carry it with one arm, though that may be pushing it.
  3. The total for one day in February 1994 is approximately 10 gigabytes. Wow. One day. I don't want to think about it. The amount of Web data that went over the backbone in February 1994 was 347 gigabytes. That's so much that if you really try and conceive of how big it is, your brain will coredump and you'll be fsck'ing childhood memories for hours. Don't think about it.
  4. A conservative estimate of Web growth weighs in at about 1% per day.
  5. To see how big the Web is today, see http://web.mit.edu/afs/sipb/user/mkgray/ht/wow-its-big.html


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Copyright © 1994, 1995, 2004 by Kevin Savetz. The information in this book was collected in 1994-1995 and has not been updated since.