I remember one of my brothers got cable back then. They told him that he should never turn off his computer or it might lose its IP address. I showed him his “Network Neighborhood” and suggested ZoneAlarm as a temporary measure until he could purchase a router.

One of my sisters’ husband got a laptop with Wi-Fi. It turned out that someone named “Steve” (based on the SSID) in his building had cable Internet and an unsecured Wi-Fi router. They had free Internet access for almost two years before Steve figured out what was happening ... or maybe just replaced his router with one that had a password.

By that time, they had obtained their own high speed connection and mostly stopped using Steve’s connection ... well, my brother in law still used it ... probably for things that he didn’t want to be traced to him. Otherwise, we would not have known that Steve had changed his connection info. From what I recall, Steve probably didn’t stay in that building long after that. Soon, there was no visible ‘Steve’ SSID at all.