Everything was encrypted through Kerberos and AFS. We had a mix of workstations running DEC Ultrix, SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, IBM AIX, and Linux.
The computing center compiled every GNU utility and put those in the PATH first so the environment was basically the same and you rarely had to worry about what type of machine you were on. We could ask a student who worked in the computing center to compile some new X11 window manager and they would and install it for all the different architectures and using AFS @sys string it would transparently link to the specific binary for that platform so you didn't need to modify your PATH
We had Zephyr instant messaging and the .anyone file where you could put all your friends in a file and see who was logged in. We would send Zephyr messages on some broadcast groups and see who wanted to meet up for lunch. I made friends with people I didn't even know before through that.
This was all from 1993-97 and then I got a job and it was like the stone age with NFS / NIS groups and chmod permissions. We are now creating stuff like zephyr with Slack
being DecStations though it might have been using the whole DCE/RPC ecosystem (which was later adopted by MS for MSRPC and hence NTLM and SMB/CIFS).