[anyfoo]

I stand corrected (sort of). I did specifically say that you‘d see zero other machines when connected to the Internet over a point-to-point link, but I indeed had no idea that in the US there were cable modems from different subscribers within the same subnet/segment and without any filtering.

In Germany, as far as I can tell it was all point-to-point.

That being said, around that time, or maybe slightly later, completely unencrypted WiFi networks were also commonplace, so…