The mental model my kids have for work is that typing or even thinking is itself a finished product. For my generation that idea of a conscious action of saving your work on a computer made me think more about what I was doing and how I was doing it. But I am an old.

If you go back in time, there were editors that by default would save the previous version of a file to .bak, each time you saved the current status. The fear of accidental saving or editing and hence overwriting old good stuff was higher than accidentally loosing new good stuff. There was less protection of system files, config files etc, so chances were you would brick apps or even the OS. Things got more forgiving since.

I understand the overall contrast you're sketching here. But can you elaborate on

> typing or even thinking is itself a finished product

Any specific examples where you notice the difference?

Do you really long for that?

It's been over 20 year with auto-save being pretty common, one has to adapt to the modern times, especially when it makes things better.

I don't have to "remember to save my work" when I write on my notepad, why should it be different on a computer?

> Do you really long for that?

Yes, absoultely. Saving data you don't want saved and overwriting data you want to retain are just as bad as not saving data you want to keep.

Keeping a scratch file to restore from unexpected applications exits (crash, power loss, etc.) is fine but beyond that I expect to be in control of when and where things are saved.

> one has to adapt to the modern times

I expect my computers to adapt to my requirements, not the other way around.

> especially when it makes things better.

Modern rarely equals better.

Neither save strategy is 'the better one'. Next step would be that git auto-commits...

Wait until you discover pen and paper.

At my first job, one of my responsibilities was to write the product manuals. My boss would set a timer next to me and instruct me to ctrl-S every time it went off.

Corrective action from having lost work too many times :-)

I wouldn't say it was totally awful. At least, prior to having an Undo option or perhaps an undo but that can only go back 3 steps, saving as before making any large changes was a pretty common workflow. I might end up with 50 versions of a document numbered incrementally by the time I was finished. that is still a necessary workflow for certain types of documents. I don't necessarily want everything saved automatically all the time.

I love my paper notebook to save everything automatically, I don't long for it to all disappear if I forget to press a button and give it a name.