[Groxx]

It's sad, but they should've compulsively hit save after every few letters - it's documented very clearly on page 404 of the manual. It's a real shame that such things couldn't be done automatically until recently, early-2000-era CPUs just weren't sophisticated enough to run advanced, reactive logic like that.

[jjmarr]

My parents indoctrinated me as a child to constantly hit save because they grew up with that. It was a part of our cultural expectations for "basic life skills to teach children".

[piker]

Serializing a document was non-trivial for the first two decades of personal computing. Auto-save would have destroyed performance.

[Groxx]

Indeed, not like today, where we're closer to the metal and have as few abstractions as possible. Maybe we'll be able to use high level languages again after this RAM shortage passes.