For the first ten years or so of the internet, you could have wiped the whole damn thing with a strong fridge magnet. Well, the DNS server anyway, and the internet would technically still be there but none of your .com attempts would work. You would have had to know the IP address. Lots of people really wanted to wipe it out, too, because lulz mostly. Only a few thousand people knew where the server was, which was its only defense. You could open any door in the building with a credit card, and walk right past security if that credit card was white and hanging off your neck by a lanyard.

We almost saw a wipe, too, in the mid 90s when a disgruntled ex came in to verbally berate his former girlfriend and shit escalated. He openly said he's going to go "shut the place down" and was making for the registry root server when security stopped him. There were no back-up servers at the time. We almost went back to zero with domain names because some guy cheated on his girlfriend and got dumped.

Even when they got backup servers and placed them around the world, the backups were still updating through queries to the A-root for a long while. It was too difficult and complicated with technology at the time to update any hardware. So it was well closer to 2010 that they finally moved the server to a more secure location and had it running on something besides base source Uniz and magneto-optical hard drives.