I was there. We had plenty of those kind of problems in those days. I also had the classical training of which you speak, but the industry was far ahead of academia in terms of actually dealing with that kind of thing. The reason pre-internet is relevant is that the penalty for a buffer overflow in 1995 might be a crashed app, or maybe a corrupted file. It was only later that the penalty became "getting pwned by some sophisticated bit of malware and needing to send monero to someone to get your compter back".