Way back those years bitcoin isn't valued much by that time so it's okay for him not to recover that as no one expecting that bitcoin will be on this stage. And it's like the most popular problem before of those miners that has mined a lot of bitcoin, they want to store it for real but unluckily as they look for some security to their bitcoins, they are wiping out their storage upon backing it up and unfortunately, they aren't able to make one back up for it.
I think this is not only one case. You are right they don't value bitcoin back then because its equivalent value is low unlike now. Maybe they think it wasn't legit. And as the time pass, different version of computers are released and he didn't backed it up. And now he/she was trying to access his/her account and he can't access it.