&gt; back from the days when the world wasn&#x27;t so networked.<p>That&#x27;s not it. Just read any magazine from that year. Everybody thought it was a terrible idea, just as autorun.exe was completely insane. Viruses was a huge problem at the time, and they spread via infected floppies or CDs and documents. So automatically running embedded code if possible even worse back then. But they went with it anyway. It&#x27;s good as long as it moves the goal posts for the competition. The business case is not always the use case.