It's sad, but they should've compulsively hit save after every few letters - it's documented very clearly on page 404 of the manual. It's a real shame that such things couldn't be done automatically until recently, early-2000-era CPUs just weren't sophisticated enough to run advanced, reactive logic like that.

Serializing a document was non-trivial for the first two decades of personal computing. Auto-save would have destroyed performance.

My parents indoctrinated me as a child to constantly hit save because they grew up with that. It was a part of our cultural expectations for "basic life skills to teach children".