>Was there ever such a time? If so then tell me when it was.
The 90s and into the early 2000s at least. You would get laughed out the room and then fucking fired if you hooked anything critical up to the internet.
"You would get laughed out the room and then fucking fired if you hooked anything critical up to the internet."
Perhaps this happened where you were, and lucky you it seems you were in a good environment.
But back then I was in IT management and I had precious little power to stop it especially given other senior managers were the culprits. The operation had another function and not IT as its primary role. Moreover, I saw very simular problems in other organizations that I was familiar with.
Also, during that period I was with another outfit whose principal function was surveillance—not of people but of info and physical stuff and I can assure you that whilst the system worked well try as we might it wasn't watertight.
This happened everywhere. I worked in a company offering management agents that had additional features if they hooked up to the internet (“cloud management” or “SaaS” before that term existed). Hospitals would never hook stuff to the internet. Industrial control systems, etc were all huge show stoppers.
No offense, but I think you’re thinking of a later era. Most protocols back then had literally no auth or auth that was never deployed. The thought of critical systems safe enough to be exposed to the internet was just really unfathomable.
I agree. Constant internet access and the assumption that other people should be able to push new code to your machine and have it run without you even being aware of it has killed all hope of resiliency.
I miss the days when any application that dared to phone home even just to check for updates was considered spyware. Today there is are huge numbers of people who have access to install and run whatever new code they want on our systems whenever they feel like it. If it's not the AV software, it's the browser, or the video card, or the mouse driver, or windows itself. It's totally unmanageable.
The 90s and into the early 2000s at least. You would get laughed out the room and then fucking fired if you hooked anything critical up to the internet.