The internet, as most people know it, came about in 1993 with the advent of the web. It was around for a very long time before that. Before, it was NSFNet and before that it was ARPANet and before that it was DARPANet.
All those were restricted. (D)ARPANet was restricted to military, some government, and universities with DAPRA contracts. At this time, what people would consider the internet was really USENET, which wasn't restricted as DAPRANet was. In fact, USENET traffic was (technically) disallowed on DARPANet.
The days of USENET had trolls, spammers, viruses and all that. The modern web just makes all of that easier to reach more people who are not technically savvy.
So, I'd say 'no', but then I've been around it since 1976.
The first prosecuted computer worm was in 1988 but many worms and viruses were known long before that. The first Unix virus was created by Ken Thompson, one of the Unix creators. It was very early in the 70s. His paper is titled, "Reflections on Trusting Trust".
Some links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm
https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh...son/trust.html
My brush with fame for catching such things as backdoors and password cracking came in 1993.
https://law.justia.com/cases/oregon/...01/a91702.html