alt Hacker NewsEarly consoles (except Nintendo cartridges), cassette players, VCRs, CD players, cable TV boxes, fax machines, photocopier, computer-controlled telescopes... While sometimes figuring out how to get them to do something in the pre-internet era was difficult, they would pretty reliably do it. The only glitches or crashes I remember on my C64 were from disk corruption (or my own coding errors).
I don't know, cassettes, VHS tapes and CDs were all extremely delicate. I remember desperately trying to rewind cassette tapes with a pencil and messing with tracking on my VCR to get a semi-viewable picture. CDs would skip like crazy... The consoles are probably the best example of plug-in-play (except the Nintendo carts like you mention).