The nightmare of any and every PhD student writing his or her thesis: My laptop was stolen with all my thesis work on it.

I was so paranoid about the lab catching fire and destroying my thesis that I had it on two computers and had about five backup copies. On floppy disks, which was the style of the times, at least one of which was always at home. If the whole science building imploded, I would have a copy that was at most one day’s worth of writing or set of revisions out of date.

Also, having grown up and done high school and college papers in an era before word processors (ask me about my fun with carbon paper!), I am quite aware how much time I saved being able to write my thesis on a computer.