[derekp7]

Except back then, you had your app running on the machine all by itself. And there was no need for security -- if putting in a magic input string caused some weird behavior, well, "don't do that". Whereas today that would be considered a security bug (even if your app isn't directly used by non-trusted sources, it could be in a deep toolchain used by some other app).

Not to mention, that when you shipped for an Atari 800, or Vic 20, you only had to test against that -- not an Atari 800 with a Nvidia Graphics chip, vs. a Matrix chip, etc.

[yuhong]

What is sad is that the Morris worm dates back to late 1988 when MS was starting the development of OS/2 2.0 and NT OS/2. Yea, I am talking about the decision to use a flat address space (instead of segmented) with default image base addresses which was what made buffer overflow etc exploits really popular.