> For example, today wifi routers “just work” right out of the box. In the early 2000s it would have taken a network engineer with knowledge of DNS, IP, Etherne

> For example, today wifi routers “just work” right out of the box. In the early 2000s it would have taken a network engineer with knowledge of DNS, IP, Ethernet, RFC1918, actual routing protocols and whole bunch of other stuff to set something like that up and they’d have well known how it worked and why it was configured the way it was. I think you are stretching how bad wifi was in early 2000s - sure its easier today, but in the actual year 2000 you could walk into a store and take home an Apple branded wifi base station (original AirPort unit) - 802.11b stuff of the era was largely as easy to connect new stuff to as today, generally with a passkey. It all largely worked with DHCP out of the box just like most routers today too, if anything the experience is much the same minus the faster speeds, slightly better range and encryption today. Oh and probably some kind of ipv6 support... You certainly did not need network engineer level knowledge - lots of smart professional folks installed wifi in the 2000s, and solutions like the AirPort base station and many others were about as "turnkey" as they came.