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The real issue is even with the limits, when the entire operating systems class was learning about forking it was really easy for a distributed fork bomb to occur.

In my school it was my "Since there are limits and no one can tell me what they are, I can figure them out by counting the number of forks that I did until it blocks" that made our head sysadmin try figuring out how to add the limits

Hm. The way I got introduced to fork bombs was someone asking me in their most innocent voice: "what kind of output do you think this will generate?".

initd also had a habit of killing child processes once the parent dies so even if you lock yourself up you could in theory log out and just wait a while (unless you nohup the process, then you are fucked)

No such luck for the first guy I knew who fork-bombed himself on a Sequent.