"You’d typically have a piece of software in your office, on one of your computers, to calculate payroll with. Most other computers would have copies of WordPerfect installed. This software would function for years without updates or maintenance. If WordPerfect-the-company would disappear, you would not even notice."

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european-situation/

Those were the days, my friends!

@jpmens how to make VC run away screaming

@jpmens If you don't control the bare metal, you don't control the data. It's that simple.

@jpmens

It was also a time when most computers weren't networked and when the distribution vector for malware was floppy disks. If you wanted to secure a computer, you simply didn't open any files from floppy disks that you didn't trust (and made sure that you always ejected the floppy before turned the machine on to avoid boot-sector viruses).

A lot of software was horribly insecure but it didn't really matter because no one could attack it. You may have been able to get arbitrary code execution by making someone open a WordPerfect file, but you didn't exchange WordPerfect files, you printed them and posted or faxed them (if you were really fancy, you printed directly to the fax so you didn't need a local printed copy).

Now, we live in a world where a great many programs are handling untrusted data and where they are likely to be actively exploited if you don't have the latest security updates.

@jpmens