Decades ago (gulp!) I did some development work using a VAX 11/750 running the VMS operating system. It did the save-as-old-name-plus-1 trick automatically. Excellent idea, assuming of course you had sufficient disc space, which was definitely an issue in the days of 1Mb 14" disc packs.
I can sort of see why it got almost forgotten during the early days of personal computers; small discs, crappy processors, unbelievably badly thought out file systems and so on. Now, it really ought to be normal. My phone has more compute power than the entire IBM research lab I used to work had back then!
Of course, it is, almost, now there is OS X Lion and once various applications get their act together to make use of it.