An interesting thought is how when devices couldn't auto-update, they had to work out the gate. I imagine this encouraged companies to do much better testing to reach a gold-plate before deploying.
Case in point when 700,000 Netgear routers pinged the University of Wisconsin–Madison NTP server (harcoded IP address) every second.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTP_server_misuse_and_abuse#Ne...