[schoen]

Wow, I just remembered that I had an account on one of these "free-net" systems at some point in high school (late 1990s).

It was a much more trusting time in which people routinely gave all kinds of computer access to strangers just to help them out, or in some sense to help the net grow. When my computer club set up a Linux server at our high school, we sort of joined in by happily giving shell accounts to random strangers who had no connection with the school at all. Nobody seemed to think this was a bad idea!

[sanity]

Yes, it reminds me that apparently email in the 1970s didn't even bother with passwords - everyone just had an inbox file that was publicly readable/writable. How times have changed.