Computers are cruel beings. You do one little thing wrong and all your work is gone. After being punished so much, it's no wonder older people are less playful

Computers are cruel beings. You do one little thing wrong and all your work is gone. After being punished so much, it's no wonder older people are less playful (or many people who we call 'non-tech-savvy' or 'computer illiterate'): they don't want to get burned again. Imagine you're working on a painting, and you have a cup of hot coffee sitting right next to it. You know that it's dangerous to keep that cup of coffee there and that a wrong flick of the wrist can ruin your work. So you get up and move that cup of coffee far away. Compare this to computers: there are all sorts of cups of coffee right within your "clumsiness distance," except these cups are hard to see at first. So if you accidentally ruin your work with a spill, the geeks will come yelling: "you should not have hit that cup off coffee!" "You should've known it was there!" Doesn't that sound ridiculous? Well, this describes years and years and years of web mail systems where you could accidentally close your window mid-e-mail and lose your work. GMail was the first e-mail provider to offer autosave as late as 2005, and, while I have no hard data to confirm, it was at least several years until Yahoo or Hotmail had that (and my paid e-mail provider Fastmail didn't have it until '09 or something like that).