Same at my University in the mid-90s. I was the CS department network admin and we had an entire /24 to use as we liked.
At least it taught me how to detect attempted hacks early because every machine had to be monitored for attacks.
I just looked and they still have a /16 (65k public addresses). This is for a school that has maybe 15k students, not all of them living on the campus. And I’m sure most of the computing takes place in the cloud now anyway.
I know there are a lot of places who were on the Net early besides the military that have excess address capacity.
Same here. Trying to type anything on that thing (especially copying the code out of magazines) was just horrible.
Edit: just remembered something that made it even worse than just the awful keys - all reserved words for BASIC were tokenized in some way where you had to use a control-key sequence to tell it PRINT, for instance, instead of being able to type P,R,I,N,T <enter>.
Back in the day I upped the RAM
and put a set of virtual machines on our VP of Marketing’s laptop with copies of our staging server, db, data… the works. He just started it up and browsed away.
He loved doing demos without a network connection etc. Back then WiFi was always restricted and hot spots too slow.
This actually can become a problem in the future. Here in Montgomery County, Maryland there was an old rail line converted to a bike path but always with the intention of adding light rail to a portion of it.
20 years later, they started the project and the local cycling groups are upset because their path has to be split and rerouted in places to support the new line. Delayed the thing many years as a result.
Our computer lab in college had these NEC/AT&T 386 desktops that had RJ-11 keyboard ports that didn’t work anywhere else.