Kevin Mitnick attacked Tsutomu Shimomura's lab in San Diego with blind TCP connections with spoofed source addresses. Linux was just coming on the scene, written for the 386, distributed on CD-ROM as slackware, as an alternative to many Unix-like clones such as Acorn, DEC, SGI, and Sun. NFS v3 was in it's hay day inside corporations and educational facilities. Commercial activity was forbidden on the Internet, .COM was not yet in use. People were still using UUCP, NNTP, finger, FTP and gopher. HTTP was starting to become a big thing. /usr/bin/sendmail by Eric Allman was how everybody received email on their own computer.