Our startup (~20 people) got slashdotted in 1998 or so. I was the only one randomly awake at the time. Remember watching all the logs from our web server in realtime, ready to immediately kill anything or anyone threatening the overall availability.

512 kbps uplink, I think. Even accidental DoS was trivial. We had a self-hosted little data center at our office with the only available stupidly expensive commercial connection.

Felt some dread having to restart the main (async, single-process) web server a few times to keep things going due to bugs in our code. So many* people on dial-up patiently waiting for the page to load.

It was exhilarating though :).

*) Surely at least a hundred!

Its funny that these days the bottleneck is usually the data layer. Servers are so powerful now that even your average $5 server can handle HN levels of load if configured correctly.