[teeray]

> Home internet in the 90s felt simple. You plugged into Ethernet, got an IPv4 address, and you could expose a service directly.

Maybe the 2000s, yes. This experience in the 90s was reserved for businesses and schools that could afford a T-carrier connection. The rest of us had dialup.

[reincarnate0x14]

Even on dialup it was common to get a public IPv4 address, depending on what service. The service I had in like 95-98 didn't promise static IPs but I effectively got the same address for weeks at a time, I'm assuming due to whatever logic was mapping accounts to addresses. They also gave you access to a FreeBSD shell if you wanted to read email via elm or pine or the like, one of the first places I saw SSH!

[kstrauser]

I had dialup with a static IP and inbound access to listening ports.