When the Internet was designed it was to have about 50
connected networks. With the explosion of networking,
the number is now approaching 300. The software in a
group of critical gateways (called the core gateways of
the ARPAnet) are not able to pass or store much more
than that number. In the short term, core reallocation
and recoding has raised the number slightly. By the
summer of '88 the current PDP-11 core gateways will be
replaced with BBN Butterfly gateways which will solve
the problem.