[dnsworks]

Absolutely. 20 years ago telcos didn't bother adding password protection to digital "switches" because they didn't even consider war dialers or the proliferation of internal documentation through bulletin boards. Unix vendors like Microsoft (Xenix), SCO, and Sun left password-less accounts (like Root, Operator, Sync) on workstations which were then immediately plugged into a shared-bus network. Not to mention the wide-open nature of the various X.25 networks like Sprintnet which were used for inter-bank communications.

[wmf]

OTOH, learning about that stuff was much harder in those days; it was much more underground and word-of-mouth.

[dnsworks]

I don't know about that. Within a month or two of buying my first modem in 1992 I was on bulletin boards that had FIDOnet subscriptions, which quickly gave me enough information to be dangerous.