I disagree. The Internet had grown enough by 1988 to host the Internet worm, which exploited a buffer overflow among other things. So that doesn't explain this

I disagree. The Internet had grown enough by 1988 to host the Internet worm, which exploited a buffer overflow among other things. So that doesn't explain this 7-year gap. The best explanation is that there were plenty of other Unix holes (race conditions, rhosts, etc.) to exploit that didn't require inventing an entirely new technique. The second part of the article goes into this in much more depth (HN link). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1321562 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1321562