Delphi becomes the first of the large centralized commercial conferencing systems to join the Internet, giving its users access to a wide range of Internet services, not just mail. Some small Gopher servers are saturated because of 100,000 Delphi users using the same menu. IIJ begins commercial IP access in Japan, and gains international connectivity the following year. This is partly because a greater percentage of the WWW traffic is images, but bytes are bytes. The Internet has perhaps 2.5 million hosts and 18 million users, in approximately 60 countries, from Antarctica to Greenland, from Fiji to Ghana, from Moscow to Cape Town, from Iceland to India.
Some themes seem clear in hindsight.
Government funding of network protocol development and network deployment is indispensible. But governments have limited foresight. People who wanted these things invented them. The same thing happened with archie and Gopher, and now with Mosaic. Many of the networks mentioned in this column have come and gone, but they all played their roles in producing the networking environment we have today.