Right at the beginning, you could attack anyone, anywhere. It took a month or so for them to make an update so that you can't attack players until they've played for an hour, and then a few more months until Lumbridge was combat-free.
I played runescape since the first week it came out, back when you could kill any player anywhere. People would stand by the lumbridge respawn and constantly kill the brand new players in single hits over and over again until they left. I wish I had some screenshots of back then, but that was almost 5 years ago. :shock: