>>21017481My oldest brother bought a modem when they announced they were going to be allowing civilian universities to access the darpa-net. He was able to get into it from a dialup connection from our home back in the very early 80s.
There was no such thing as security for the few government servers that were accessible so technically it was legal to access them but not to alter any file that was present in them.
It was not much to look at with simple lists of the contents of the directories and files but he explained to me that it would be illegal for anyone to do anything other than read the files.
A few months later a 15 year old kid in cali was swated for messing with the files on a similar data storage system. Sort of drove the point home for me.
Later on in the early 90s there were simple files that you could access with the data content of all the things that the feds and glowies wanted to censor from being searched for. Was kinda like having a long list of clues for us early hunters of knowledge.
The real internet died in 2007 when Chinese censorship technology was used against Google as the company announced that they were being allowed to operate inside of China. It was actually the other way around with the Chinese military being given control over the once free internet.
https://www.abebooks.com/9780976116806/Deception-Clinton-Sold-America-Out-0976116804/plp