It certainly wouldn't have been called swatting. Prior to the 1990's, only large metro departments like the LAPD had SWAT teams. The Internet really is necessa

It certainly wouldn't have been called swatting. Prior to the 1990's, only large metro departments like the LAPD had SWAT teams. The Internet really is necessary for this sort of sustained attack to be successful. It requires a large number of distributed, anonymous actors. This wouldn't be possible without message boards and the like. Had this been one bad actor with a vendetta in the pre-Internet era, they would have been found and stopped. Of course they are also leveraging some fairly modern services: TTY relay services for the hearing impaired, Tor (to include onion services), as well as commercial cybercrime services available via private and darkweb markets. Without these resources, it is much easier to identify people.