At the time, WiFi wasn't a thing. The internet backbone was provided by the government, and man-in-the-middle attacks were basically theoretical so far as I kno

At the time, WiFi wasn't a thing. The internet backbone was provided by the government, and man-in-the-middle attacks were basically theoretical so far as I know. Basically you trusted your hardware and internet provider, and so long as there weren't any devices connected (probably by ethernet) to your local network there wasn't an obvious way to sniff traffic or carry out an attack. The world is different now, with a whole bunch of potentially untrustworthy ISPs and a lot of broadcasting over public or easily-crackable WiFi and mobile networks. That's why SSL is absolutely critical now, but it wasn't at the time.