If the "stone age" is Windows 9x/2000, where am I? Yes, I use Windows XP on a desktop system, and Windows 98 SE on laptops. But one laptop, which supports the membership database of a small nonprofit organization, runs on Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Yes, it does the job, quickly and reliably. It connects to the rest of my home network so it can use a laser printer attached to another laptop. It doesn't support a new enough web browser to show any of the current websites properly, but that's not what I use it for.

Well, then, sir, one would have to distinguish the stages of primordial soup. In the 1950's I took a computer course at MIT on (among other machines) Whirlwind, a stored-program computer equipped with an assembler on which relocation had been already implemented but was considered too sophisticated for us students to use. In the 1960's I used a mainframe at Bell Labs for which the input was punched cards and the language was Fortran. In the 1970's I used Unix at Bell Labs. In the 1980's I wrote an accounting system for a nonprofit organization in C on a Unix machine, and learned how to use MS-DOS on a PC. Windows for Workgroups, a product of the 1990's with a graphical user interface, is quite advanced compared with these. I mean, any fool could tell WfW from an assembler with paper tape input, but could not so easily distinguish it from WinXP. In terms of time as well as technology, it's closer to XP than to Whirlwind. Please, sir, let us not forget our heritage.

Careful eightbit, You're dating yourself