The Size and Growth Rate of the Internet in 1993

"Everywhere on the global Internet, which is now roamed by an estimated 15 million computer users, the growth rates are staggering.

"At the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Champaign, Ill., a new service that answers requests to an electronic library called the World Wide Web, has seen the number of daily queries explode from almost 100,000 requests in June to almost 400,000 in October. Officials at the center say the only solution may be to take a $15 million supercomputer away from its normal scientific number-crunching duties and employ it full time as an electronic librarian.

"This year, information retrieved using a popular searching program called Gopher increased more than 400 percent, to almost 200 billion bytes a month -- about seven million newspaper pages" (John Markoff, "Business Technology; Jams Already on Data Highway", nytimes.com, 11-03-1993).