Back in the win98 and win2k years, we had a nice wired/wireless network. I had a shared server that served as a repository of all the movies, music, and games I collected.
I also taught my sister about piracy, emulation, and other things. She also had her own good machine, with unrestricted net access at 9 yrs old. The first game she had loaded on was duke nukem 3d. (yes, my dad was 'interesting')
Her big games were pokemon. And she owned the cartridges, bu waned to play with rom hacking and the like... So she looked for Pokemon yellow, and found one. Pokemon_yellow.zip. Inside was the rom and an exe. When she ran it, the virus hopped over to every executable that was on the shared server.
I'm pretty sure I could have fixed them, because it only seemed more of a bacteria than something nefarious. It just annoyed the hell out of me, because I had my games directory mounted via samba from this server.
If your computer is a bastion of alone-ness, you need not fear. But the second you include a trust net, you can be done in.
Now, I'm a killall wineserver away from refusing an 'infection'.
(sidenote: do I submit them to the AppDB?)
This was written a year ago. Keep in mind that I'm not saying AV isn't useful - it is in some situations. However, I'm of the opinion that the "AV age", where AV companies battle it out to innovate and beat the competition, is pretty much over. It's not useful against any determined attacker, and it's ridiculously easy to bypass AV simply by changing a few bytes here or there, or by running it through whatever random packer you found on some forum.
Yes, general purpose computing does necessitate some form of filtering, but there are much better solutions than AV in most cases. Mobile platforms like iOS / Android can be locked down quite well - install what you want and then lock installations. Desktop OSes like Windows, Linux and OS X are harder to deal with, but there are still protective measures that can be taken, such as whitelisting, that are more effective than any AV.
Don't install viruses.
Actually, AutoRun was turned off for external media as of Windows 7. CDs and DVDs will still do it, but only for read-only disks, not read-write ones.
I don't know a single person that did not had an AV on those days. Of course in Portugal you could only buy "backups".
Apple II does not count, as I don't remember virus for 8 bit systems.
Mac OS < X did had quite a nice list of virus, but it depended on the software source, as I mentioned on my previous post.
EDIT: Just to add my own experience.
Timex 2068 and ZX Spectrum 48+ at home, followed by all Microsoft OSs starting with MS-DOS version 3.3. Also used DR-DOS 5.0.
Friends had ZX-Spectrum +2(A)/+3, Amiga 500 and Atari ST systems, which we used together in computing parties.
Novel Netware, AS/400 and Xenix at the technical school before going to the university.
My first Linux version used the kernel 1.0.9.
The university had Macs LC II available.
But for the 16bit systems used at home, everybody I knew had an AV to check floppy contents before running anything.
The article almost could've been written in the nineties before the commercial malware arrived, but when polymorphic malware became the standard.
The age of AV is unfortunately anything but over as long as people wish to run software they want to, e.g. unlike the iOS. AV is a good filter for most of the malware that you might accidentally bump into, but that's it. You're silly if you don't have one, and you're silly if you think that you're totally safe with it.