Comment by smokel

Well, people used MS-DOS which had basically no security model at all for at least 10 years. Most viruses were benign, but it was almost trivial to simply wipe the entire hard disk. People generally didn't care, and made backups.

Things have become a bit more complicated now that machines are connected all the time, and the risk of infection is no longer limited to physically inserting a floppy disk into a machine.

I suspect that the solution is not so much in trying to make our current systems secure, but to make disconnection more practical.