> 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

> 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.