alt Hacker NewsIt's from a bygone era. An era when you'd lose hours of work if you didn't go file -> save, (or ctrl-s, if you were obsessive). If you reboot, you lose all of your work, your configuration, that you haven't saved to disk. Computers were scarce, back in those days. There was one in the house, in the den, for the family. These days, I've got a dozen of them and everything autosaves. But so that's where that comes from.
Home computers seem more scarce to me today than they did ~25 years ago.
Sure: People have smart TVs and tablets and stuff, which variously count as computing devices. And we've broadly reached saturation on pocket supercomputers adoption.
But while it was once common to walk into a store and find a wide array of computer-oriented furniture for sale, or visit a home and see a PC-like device semi-permanently set up in the den, it seems to be something that almost never happens anymore.
So, sure: Still-usable computers are cheap today. You've got computers wherever you want them, and so do I. But most people? They just use their phone these days.
(The point? Man, I don't have a point sometimes. Sometimes, it's just lamentations.)