> 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
You remember things differently than I
You remember things differently than I
Our setup in the early 2000s was the same as today, except the AP, router, and modem were separate devices. This was somewhat beneficial: today, my monopoly ISP forces me to use their all-in-one junk box. There's not even a possibility of competition, and lo and behold, I don't think the forced-box does anything more than the three pieces of equipment did. (Except, finally and only as of the last year, IPv6. But perhaps if there had been real competition, that'd happened a decade sooner, esp. since I first saw it in '07 on a non-ISP connection…)
Combining the AP/router I can get behind. It's when it became ISP domain that it went south.
The 90s were rougher, as the networking stack in Windows was a bit more terrible. I have vague nightmares about installing drivers for TCP … where the TCP driver was somehow specific to the network card. That sentence doesn't even make sense by today's standards. Stuff got better in the 2000s.
By the mid 2000s, Linksys started coming out with their little WRT routers, which were affordable by home users and mostly just plug and play.