That's similar to how parents can't think of a world where they would let their unprotected child walk 500 meters to the school nearby.
Those system did not have network access at first and when they finally did most of the people on the net at the time were know (small community) and peer pressure kept people in line. ITS had a easy command that would kill and shutdown the machine. This took all the fun out of hacking the machine and killing it. There was always a loser that would try it and he would forever be forsaken by the Hackers.
Read Hackers by Steven Levy. I read that book every year almost.
Well in the end the frequency of someone pressing the red button went down as the challenge was pretty much eliminated. You're looking at it as if the glass was half empty. It's not perfect but it allowed them maximum freedom to play with small downsides of troublemakers.
This obviously wouldn't work today but back then the culture of the users was very different.
Those system did not have network access at first and when they finally did most of the people on the net at the time were know (small community) and peer pressure kept people in line. ITS had a easy command that would kill and shutdown the machine. This took all the fun out of hacking the machine and killing it. There was always a loser that would try it and he would forever be forsaken by the Hackers.
Read Hackers by Steven Levy. I read that book every year almost.