The Internnet 1980s
I still remember 80s Internet well!
Well.. it didn't exist anywhere like it is today, but it was still available to the general public.. primarily for email only. There were quite a few companies which had access to the Internet of this era who created email and file transfer frontend applications to use and would charge a monthly fee. CompuServe being a big one at the time.
Then there were companies who had their mainframes available to anyone who knew their phone number or could find it using a war dialer.
Security was nothing like it is today. Odd thing though, on many systems passwords given out at the time could not be changed. These passwords were often complex, but only 8-10 characters. If you could change it, you can imagine what people changed it to.
Accessing a system via frontend application you could only guess a few times. If you came in via telnet, a lot of systems let you guess forever. It really didn't take long to brute force or use dictionary attacks to gain access.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
