Do you really need antiviral software?

I've been on the internet since about 1997 and have been using either Norton or Zone Alarm for antiviral and firewall and what not. I download updates whenever they come out and scan my computers every week. NOT ONCE in all that time did the antiviral ever find anything. No viruses, worms, bugs, nothing. Nada. Is it even worth it to keep buying this stuff?

Seems like you need pop-up blockers a lot more than antivirus.

Do you really need antiviral software?antivirus download

Well...

If your firewall has been doing its job all this time, a good bit of potential infection may never have made it past the gate. So your impression may be out of step with reality on the other side of your firewall.

But more generally, you should be worried about malware in this world, and you do need something to detect and remove it if it gets past your defenses. This is certainly true UNLESS:

you are running an operating system which has no malware aimed at it. One of IBM's mainframe OS, for instance. Or Microware's OS-9 running on an obscure computer of which there are few copies in the world. I have one of those and don't worry much about viruses when it's running.

or an operating system which itself is more nearly secure than the most common ones. Linux and other Unix variants (eg, the BSDs or Apple's OS X) were, from their start, carefully laid out to prevent users from interferring with each other or with each others' data and files. If properly configured, these are not very susceptible to malware, and certainly not to the malware aimed as Windows systems.