Comment by nosianu

I've been on the Internet since 1992, directly connected at home (student dorms at the time) vial ethernet cable and university ATM backbone since 1994.

At that time I was an admin of said student network, and at the same time built TCP/IP based network and email infrastructure at a subsidiary of a large German company as a side job.

So I was an admin of routers, switches, various services (email, Usenet server, webservers, fax server).

Funny enough - we only added a firewall in front of the student network to protect against our own student's experiments rather than against outside intrusions, at least initially (for example, one person setting up their own Usenet server brought down DNS by flooding it with queries)!

We never had any problems with spam or attackers. "you just didn't notice the attacks!" - NO. When you go online today you get an eternal stream of automated intrusion attempts, visible in all your log files.

Today does not even remotely compare with the easy-going Internet of the 1990s.

Usenet, forums, email - they were all very much usable with minimal or zero spam, and very basic user management. Today, with such a basic setup like we used to have, you would be 100% and chock-full of spam shortly after putting such a server online.