Ehh? It had only recently been made explicitly criminal by federal statute. If you're thinking of "the Hacker Crackdown" that occurred a few years after the Morris Worm, or of Kevin Mitnick's exploits, it's worth keeping in mind that they were doing pretty crazy shit even relative to today; they were owning up phone switches across the country. And despite that, the penalties were not crazy high.

What you didn't have back then was financial fraud on the scale that happens today, where even nominal damages run into 8-9 figures.