back then I remember that people generally had a single computer, used by the whole family! It's definitely not good for kids to trivially install a banking trojan when downloading stuff. Nowadays: all my data belongs to a single user, I am the only user on 5 machines. The only thing for which root is good, is to secure fw updating and deleting ZFS/BTRFS-snapshots. Unfortunately there's still setuid-binaried weakening this security model.