When I began studying computer security in the mid 1990’s, encryption on network protocols was the exception, not the norm.
Many devices used telnet instead of SSH, with no option to even switch to SSH. This left these devices vulnerable to sniffing for passwords.
FTP was still wildly popular and suffers the same type of problems with sniffing.
Telnet, FTP, and others had modules, patches, etc to enable encrypted authentication, Kerberos, or wrap the session in encryption, but these were also not widely used or supported.
The web was mostly still running on HTTP. Basically the only thing using SSL were payment processors and banks. Almost everything else was unencrypted.
Now in 2024, almost everything is encrypted and products will not be taken seriously if they do not offer this kind of protection.
Important to note that around the year 2000, having a gigabyte of RAM and two cores was on the higher end of specs for most people, servers included. Many servers had 1 core and 256mb of RAM. Encryption implementations weren’t very efficient or performant, and adding encryption to meager hardware definitely did have an impact on performance.