nospam wrote:
In article , Frank Slootweg
wrote:

The company I worked for banned them many years ago - for reasons of (a)
concern of theft of secure [either in the government (it was a defence
contractor) or commercial sense] material, and (b) fear of infection.

Exactly. Same with the little 150K employee computer company I worked
for. As soon as USB ports showed up on computers, they were made
inoperable. (No card-readers at that time.) That was well before the
year 2000.

there weren't very many usb peripherals 'well before the year 2000' so
disabling the usb ports didn't make much of a difference.

Huh? The discussion is about USB (memory) sticks!

meanwhile, ethernet ports remained active...

Duh! Yes, they were quite handy to connect to our *intra*net, thank
you very much! And yes, our Internet gateways were very secure/strict,
TYVM. (Think NET-15 (and -16.)