Hard to believe that during those times in IRC, you were used to automatically (and proudly) advertising your IP address, your exact client version, and the means for a direct connection to your client without any server in between (CTCP, literally “client-to-client protocol”). And all of that most often with no packet filter whatsoever, not even NAT, in between.
Everything was plaintext, including “authentication”, which was (at best) just asking the “ident server” on the same machine as your client who you claimed to be, which was considered sufficient because, after all, to run identd on its “privileged” low port meant you were an “administrator” (i.e. root of a unix machine).
