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@neuralex There is a lot of point to this, especially given the rather debased approach to quality many web and mobile app developers expect people to accept, but I did want to mention one thing:

>they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort)

Inadvertent data *erasing* through normal user operations wasn't super common, but much like today, inadvertent data *loss* was reasonably common, often through non-obvious means (i.e., not things like your cat dumping a cup of coffee onto the stack of floppy disks inhabiting your desk).

When I was a young 'un in the 1980s, my parents got an IBM PC (a true OG PC, not a clone). One of the first programs I wrote was a BASIC program to display the entire printable character set (ASCII + the DOS extended "high bit set" characters) one by one. This PC definitely only used the old 8.3 file name format, so I saved the file as "IBM CHAR.BAS" on a floppy.

Note the space. It seemed like a reasonable way to abbreviate "IBM CHARacters".

However, there was, at the time, no straightforward way to access a file in DOS with a space in the name -- at least, not to a relatively new user. You could create such a file, but not access it. (I remember trying at least a few possibilities, none of which worked. This now-bordering-on-vintage blog post suggests there really was no way in ordinary use: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090709-00/?p=17563.)

The file was effectively gone, through some action that was not obviously problematic.

A lot of us who were proto-computer nerds in the 80s and 90s ran into issues like this quite a lot with the old CLI interfaces of the day.