First thing you need to realise, the internet has been around in one form or another for decades.

The internet as we know it has been around for over 30 years.

However, before widespread adoption of the internet, viruses were spread either by BBS services or via disk.

As a young Acorn achimedes user in the late 80s and early 90s I would obtain floppy disks with games on from friends, they would have obtained them from other friends who either downloaded them via BBS or bought them from a dodgy market stall. You could also buy them from magazine advertisements (I once bought a few floppy disks with porn on them).

There was always a risk that one of these disks had a virus on. For me it wasnt an issue. The Acorn used ROM to store the operating system and all your other files were kept on disks. We couldn’t afford a hard drive so we were immune, however I did once have a disk that had a virus called Marburg on it according to our virus killer at the time.