4 ms·
The simpler explanation is nobody was using firewalls when it was invented. Throughout most of the 90's, many people had unfiltered IPv4 at their desktops. I ha
by icedchai 5y ago
The simpler explanation is nobody was using firewalls when it was invented.
Throughout most of the 90's, many people had unfiltered IPv4 at their desktops. I had dedicated internet at home: no firewall... at work, same thing.
- nunez 5y ago100%. When Microsoft made Windows Firewall opt-out with Windows XP SP2, it caused SOOOOOOO many headaches. On one hand, no more rogue porn pop-ups during work! On the other hand, nobody knew what a firewall was and why trying to use Skype or whatever was such a PITA. It’s a bit of a shame that one simply cannot use the Internet without a firewall of some kind (unless you really like getting cryptoransomed in, like, 30 seconds)
- jjav 5y agoIndeed. Through the 90s at $JOBS, my desktop workstation has a public IP address and was directly on the Internet without any kind of firewalling. Sendmail ran locally and I'd send/receive email to/from the world directly on my workstation. Same for FTP, HTTP, etc. That's how the Internet was originally intended to operate.
- kazen44 5y agoi doubt firewalls even existed in any capacity at this time. routing packets in and of itself was already quite an CPU intensive task, analysing and blocking packets would be a whole other ballgame during the early days.
- anthk 5y agoMost people with 486 and Pentium used Iptables.
- yencabulator 5y agoIptables was the third generation of Linux firewalling: ipfwadm, ipchains, iptables, nftables, ...
- icedchai 5y agoEarly firewalls, like Checkpoint for example, did exist. They were, however, not widely used outside of the enterprise. I worked for several small ISPs and typically only larger enterprises even bothered. Small companies and even universities had public IP on the desktops.
- yencabulator 5y agoipfwadm was in Linux around 1996.