Eli5 In the days of dial up internet how would large organisations (or even homes with more than 1 computer) enable multiple computers to use the internet at once
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Before “NAT routers” (what most home users call routers) exist, there were proxy servers. You may hear them as a nefarious thing hackers want to install on your PC, but they are useful in general.
One device was given an internet connection – presumably dial-up – and ran a basic internet sharing program which was this proxy. You still had a LAN like you do in your home/business now – slower, not wireless, but the basic building blocks are there – and this dialup machine was part of it. PCs on the LAN could connect to the dial-up machine, name the URL it wanted, and the proxy would download it on your behalf and forward it to you.
“LAN” may also be too strong a word. PC-to-PC connections using something like a serial port is possible. PCs back then had serial ports, and if you didn’t need them for anything else, they were still as fast as dialup and so could easily keep up.
Now, if an organization was really big and rich, you could get an internet connection faster than dialup and even connect to the internet by a real router. Now it looks more like the setup you have at home, just with more expensive, more industrial equipment.
You can still find “Proxy” settings in the network options of some programs, including most web browsers. And you can still find programs that can make use of them. If you use Putty for SSH access, you may be able to use it as a proxy service.
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