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Comment by jakevoytko | Hacker News Reader

There are some rose-colored glasses when people say this.

Programs didn’t auto save and regularly crashed. It was extremely common to hear someone talk about losing hours of work. Computers regularly blue screened at random. Device drivers weren’t isolated from the kernel so you could easily buy a dongle or something that single-handedly destabilized your system. Viruses regularly brought the white-collar economy to its knees. Computer games that were just starting to come online and be collaborative didn’t do any validation of what the client sent it (this is true sometimes now, but it was the rule back then).

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> Viruses regularly brought the white-collar economy to its knees.

Now, it's anti-virus (Crowdstrike) that does that. I don't think many or any virus or ransomware has ever had as big an impact at one time as Crowdstrike did. Maybe the ILOVEYOU worm.

crowdstrike is not your average antivirus like malwarebytes or avast. the whole point is you can remote control everything with custom rules and enforce a security policy by locking the device until someone updates it. that update system is the main reason the bug was so dangerous. its built for corporate places who care about compliance more than actual security.

It's amazing that the world has largely forgotten the terror of losing entire documents forever. It happened to me. It happened to everyone. And this is the only comment I've seen so far here to even mention this.

Bad old days indeed!

Indeed, but it was pretty easy to develop the habit of hitting whatever function key was bound to "Save" fairly frequently. I certainly did.

Also auto-save is a mixed bag. With manual save, I was free to start editing a document and then realize I want to save it as something else, or just throw away my changes and start over. With auto-save, I've already modified my original. It took me quite a while to adjust to that.

If your program's auto-save works like that, it's broken.

Almost none do, though. Auto-save almost always writes to a temporary file, that is erased when you save manually.

Google Docs and VS Code are the first two that come to mind for autosave and they don't use a temp file.

Fun fact: I was on the Google Docs team from 2010-2015. Save didn't do anything but we still hooked up an impression to the keystroke to measure how often people tried to save. It was one of the top things people did in the app at first; it was comparable to how often people would bold and unbold text. And then as people gained confidence it went down over time.

This is DELIGHTFUL.

Yeah, source code editors tend to do that. They integrate with external tools that expect to read those files, so if they don't overwrite them, those tools would run the wrong version. It would still be better if they didn't.

Text editors shouldn't do that though. And those shared-view editors that don't have the concept of saving have this very relevant drawback.

I still occasionally make that auto-save mistake.

AI tools have caused me to trip up a few times too when I fail to notice how many changes haven’t been checked into git, and then the tool obliterates some of its work and a struggle ensues to partially revert (there are ways, both in git and in AI temporary files etc). It’s user error but it is also a new kind of occasional mistake I have to adapt to avoid. As with when auto-save started to become universal.

Saving also often took a long time, so people didn't do it very often.

Certainly depended on the software. But disks were slow back then, and a save would commonly block the entire UI. If your software produced big files you could wait for an inconvenient amount of time

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