I used to be that old, I was already a professional when I programmed my "Pocket" Computers, to use in place of hand calculators and on-board mechanical adders, as a portable device to handle cargo ships.
IBM hadn't released PC's anyway, and laptops were a long way off. It was over a dozen years before laptops started being used a bit, but there I was, the only one to be seen carrying a portable computer up the gangway with all the options including the 4-color mini printer-plotter and RS-232 interface before they started calling them COM ports. In the full TRS-80 carrying case I guess it gave the first image of what was to come with laptops eventually.
It would be cool if they still had portable plotters now, since we expected all kinds of technology to become more common once the 21st century got here. I'm probably just not up to date, they're probably everywhere and I just don't know about it.
Anyway, I update my main Linux systems manually every month, so it doesn't bug me but I have to keep up with it.
The occasional Windows Pro PCs are not allowed on the web every day but they autoupdate as a mainstream user. Maybe you would like the "elusive" LTSC versions if you stick with Windows so you can choose to avoid updates entirely, but this soon leaves you insecure if you don't at least enable security updates, you need that much auto or manually when you do go on the web.
For scientific instruments that only support Windows Pro, I highly tweak it so that nothing ever interrupts that primary purpose, and simply stay off the web forever. On one instrument the 2016 version of Windows 10 32-bit will be going strong until there is no functional hardware any more within reason. Spectrometer readings work the same year after year with no upsets or surprises.
Unlike one of the units at the time where IT was still responsible, it eventually auto updated from W7 to W10 when it really got ridiculously forceful. I told them they might not want to let that happen :(
Well that locked up one of the robotic titrators due to completely misguided permissions and there was no way to recover without physically dismantling the unit while full of chemicals, before the internal memory chip could be removed and returned to previous backward-compatible functionality.
So after all these years I do think "upgrades" definitely have their upsides and downsides, and people should still be able to choose as well as they could during higher-quality times.