[Chinjut]

The 10% number is completely made up. According to Paul Graham, "I was there when this statistic was cooked up, and this was the recipe: someone guessed that there were about 60,000 computers attached to the Internet, and that the worm might have infected ten percent of them."

[nakamoto_damacy]

That figure is probably UUCP mostly not live connected hosts. I could be wrong, but 60k hosts that you could telnet to sounds like a lot of ducking hosts back then. I was there too, in my late teens. God bless PG.

[wkat4242]

Yeah and a 'host' back then wasn't a cheap PC or something, they tended to be $30000 workstations or $300000 servers. At tech companies and Universities only, and mostly in the US. 60k sounds like a lot for those days. It grew massively from the early 90s.

Even UUCP was still really fringe and those weren't actually connected hosts on tcp/ip. They had their own dialup mail exchange protocol similar to fidonet.