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>Did the "killer poke" reduce Commodore PET sales? Speaking as someone who owned a Commodore PET, knew others who owned them, occasionally worked at a sort of
by yodon 2y ago
>Did the "killer poke" reduce Commodore PET sales?
Speaking as someone who owned a Commodore PET, knew others who owned them, occasionally worked at a sort of "pre-Internet Internet cafe" with dozens of PETs available for public use, and who sold a Commodore PET into the used market during their heyday, no.
PET's were pre-consumer-Internet and pre-BBS, so if someone was in a position to damage your machine, they were there in the room with you. There was no risk of random network viruses.
Sneaker-net sharing of programs on cassette tapes made tape-borne viruses impractical, to say nothing of their likely not even having been invented yet.
People did not set their friends' machines on fire, either digitally or with matches.
- RulerOf 2y ago> PET's were pre-consumer-Internet and pre-BBS, so if someone was in a position to damage your machine, they were there in the room with you. There was no risk of random network viruses. This makes me wonder. The beginning of the Windows XP era saw an abundance of worms, and the eras immediately following it saw plenty of RCEs on systems where admin privilege was typical. With only a handful of BIOS vendors and most of them having ROM update utilities that worked under Windows, I'm a little amazed that we never saw widespread malicious code that just purposely bricked machines upon the next reboot.