When I was at uni, home broadband hadn't really happened properly yet. It was home 56K modem if you were lucky. The university had some stupendous speed line (100Mbps or so leased line was AMAZING for the day). They also issued accounts with quota'd storage, but the quota was huge.
It was a common thing to go in on Saturday (remote access wasn't really a thing at modem speeds) and just download a ton of shite, and stick it on ZIP disks (the PCs all had ZIP drives) or even floppies (showing my age) and take it home. Literally, sneakernet via the London Underground had a greater bandwidth than anything I could achieve at home. It wasn't unusual for me to come back with a 50-floppy spanned ZIP file. I got to know the command line version of PKZIP very well.
At home, I did have a 1 x CD-recorder, so it was all kept for posterity too.
But I never once flagged on any quota audit or got discovered, despite the fact that there was a regular name-and-shame email that if you appeared on three times, you got a talking to and account restrictions. The reason I didn't get caught was mainly that the script that calculated home-folder sizes ran on Sunday and emailed you on Monday morning. I'd spend Mon-Fri downloading and then took it all home on Saturday.
The other reason I never got flagged is that I had an older brother who had been to the same university. His account was still active years after he left with the same password, and he had unlimited storage (as he had started on a PhD). I even went to the IT department and asked if it was okay for me to use, and they literally couldn't find the account, but then I just tried logging in and there it was. Even had full FTP access too, so it wasn't unusual to give it to friends at other places for them to upload / download stuff to it.
But I never bothered with "media" of any kind (not even that naughty stuff). There just wasn't much of it back then, and an MP3 or two was about it.
Now I admin networks (which, fittingly, have 100Mbps leased lines). Literally, I don't see how what I was doing was allowed or went unnoticed given the expense and rarity of that resource back then, or how they didn't pick up on the storage fluxing, or how people could just store tons of shite. But I probably have it better now that everyone has a connection. The worst I have now is a folder of MP3s or a rogue "sync all my Google Drive to my home folder".
600 users. 2Tb of active storage. That includes EVERYTHING, even email, for every user. That kind of space could only be dreamed of back then, but it's positively miniscule by today's standards.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
