Comment by tptacek

I can do more with the Internet today than I could with a static /22 assigned over my ISDN BRI back in the mid-1990s. A lot of things I would do back then, I would do differently today; running a chat system by connecting directly out to 6667/tcp feels pretty silly now, for instance. It's rough to build protocols that work that way today, but you're not missing much. Things were not better before the advent of presumptive NAT.