that is really unpleasant.. engineers worked, companies worked and volunteers also worked to make the modern Internet, and selfish-clever, thieving, control-oriented militaristic jerks from WINDOWS filled the content with WINDOWS virus activity to play cheap stealing tricks on unsuspecting people. And you call it "the Internet" .. it has nothing to do with "the Internet" as much as the cheap and aggressive culture of BS from WINDOWS at that time
They simply didn't really care. If another OS was dominant, it is easy to argue that fundamental security issues could have been addressed in a better fashion, if management wanted it to be so.
To wit, this is the same era of computing that spawned OpenBSD. You can't say with a straight face that OpenBSD would have been brought down by oversized ping packets or be allowed to accept traffic out of the box like Windows was.