But why is it that computers are that magical? Computers have been now around for nearly 70 years. It's a technology as new as airplanes were in 1980. (If we include digital accounting machines with storage, they have been around even before the first flight of the Wright brothers, they are even older than any living person.) Computers are also the means by which many, if not most, are dealing with for a living on a daily basis. If we consider users generally as unfit to grasp even the basics, why is it that anyone is still admitted to their kitchen? (There are really dangerous, pointy objects there, which may cause real-life harm, and, if you have a gas oven, you may even blow up the house or the entire block. How could ordinary people tell a knife from a dish and how could we assume that they would know where they put them? Isn't it possible that someone just wanted to have a glass of water from the tap and blew up the house instead?)

Also, I consider some of this very US centric. In many parts of the world, AOL wasn't a big thing. In many languages, people are used to the fact that important parts of a sentence come at the very end, e.g., the verb, at least in some tenses. Moreover, most important identifiers go from the minor, less important part to the bigger, most significant ones. Why can't we tell users that domains work just like their post address? (As in "street-city-country". And there are even funny ones, like "street-city-state-country" and even funnier ones, like "c/o", meaning it's not the usual addressee. Why are people able to deal with this?) If you're living in a western country, even your own name works probably like this. Why this, oh, it's magic, don't care?

I'd say, it is mostly, because we encourage them not to care. Because we say, "Yes, that's really difficult", where we ought to say, "No, it's really simple and you ought to know." The user is still the person in charge. Pampering and flattering the person in charge into incompetence isn't apt to end well.

I'd say, there's a chance to convey simple things, like, the cloud is not on your local machine, or how a URL is principally constructed. Or that a file is saved only, when you safe a file.

Edit: Returning to the obligatory-car-simile, when I did my driver's test, I had to know the intrinsics of an engine, of the braking mechanism, of the steering. I was tested for knowledge of ad-hoc technical repair. It was assumed reasonable for a driver to grasp, to memorize the details, to minutely describe them, and it was even mandatory to do so in order to obtain a license. However, it was less important to drive a car then (you could do well without this in most occupations) than it is to operate a computer nowadays.

Edit 2: And, to level up a bit, how comes that academics are able to correctly cite a book and page, but are unable to parse a URL – and are even flattered for the latter?