Ours was a General Automation machine but it had the same 16 switches that you had to throw in the proper sequence (not 1 thru 16 of course) in order to boot the thing. One thing that those old machines had on their hard drives was what was called a "write lockout" switch. Throw it on and that hard drive could not be written to. Seems to me that if the drives of today had that then there would be no virus problem. Just put your OS on a smaller independent drive of it's own.

Nah, you ain't gettin older, you're getting better!