in the very early 2000s, home routers weren't a thing. Cable modems hooked up to a single computer. If you were a business, you got a PIX, but home setups were frequently done with a computer that had 2 ethernet ports and either used Windows's "home internet sharing" or Linux's ipchains and NAT. This was typically fine, because very few houses had multiple computers. I knew many people who would get a separate cable modem for each computer in their house.

By the mid 2000s, Linksys started coming out with their little WRT routers, which were affordable by home users and mostly just plug and play.

What you describe is late 90's, not early 2000's. Broadband was rolling out across many areas of the US in the late 90's (@Home cable modems, DSL, etc.)

Me too. Plug-and-play consumer wi-fi routers were common place by the early 2000's.

Yeah. It was a bit different from today, but not by much. Really if anything, stuff has regressed since then.

Our setup in the early 2000s was the same as today, except the AP, router, and modem were separate devices. This was somewhat beneficial: today, my monopoly ISP forces me to use their all-in-one junk box. There's not even a possibility of competition, and lo and behold, I don't think the forced-box does anything more than the three pieces of equipment did. (Except, finally and only as of the last year, IPv6. But perhaps if there had been real competition, that'd happened a decade sooner, esp. since I first saw it in '07 on a non-ISP connection…)

Combining the AP/router I can get behind. It's when it became ISP domain that it went south.

The 90s were rougher, as the networking stack in Windows was a bit more terrible. I have vague nightmares about installing drivers for TCP … where the TCP driver was somehow specific to the network card. That sentence doesn't even make sense by today's standards. Stuff got better in the 2000s.