I had the advantage of being 18 when the internet was still pretty open and I had all the access I needed through my university. I even remember finding a list of root passwords to various machines at Standford lying in one of the computer labs. No idea how it got there. But I tested one with a quick rlogin and it worked fine. Oops. I emailed them to let them know and got basically a <shrug> in reply. Those days certainly were easier for a kid who was learning networking, but they couldn't last with more and more people getting connected and making it more tempting for bad actors to fool around.
> I had the advantage of being 18 when the internet was still pretty open
There is no doubt that is an extreme advantage. When I started college in the late 90s an upperclassman was in my dorm for a party and saw a trophy i had from a USFirst robotics competition in HS, he invited me to join an organization he was in that built autonomous robots (we called them "vehicles") for a competition. In that lab, we had network drops and static IPs on the schools inet connection. The lab's admin knew the DNS guys and so we could run whatever we wanted on a fast internet connection with access to our own hostnames. At this time Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL were just starting to take off. That lab and inet opportunity convinced me to change my major to CS and kickstarted my whole career.
edit: that "lab" was really just an unused room in a random building with some desks and hand tools like screwdrivers and stuff to work on our robots. ..but it had rj45 plugs :)
It wasn’t as hard back then to sift the chaff from the grain. You were either a computer nerd or you were part of the unwashed masses.
If you showed any interest in computing, other geeks would take you with open arms (mostly) versus now where everyone and their dog wants in on the ground floor.
