One of my favorite memes on Slashdot is the "Why, in my day..." (along the lines of Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen). Here is a taste:
Old guy #1: Yes, sir, a six-bit character set was all we had, and we liked it!
Old guy #2: You had a character-set? Damn you were lucky! Back in MY day all we had was a bunch of rocks, and we communicated by banging the rocks together.
Old guy #3: Rocks!! Do you know what we would have done for rocks! A good honest rock could get you places. No Sir. All we had was mud. Mud and straw. We used to pile the mud up into segments to make registers and then use the straw to represent numbers. We didn't have any of your holier than thou binary formats. No Sir. We had unary and we liked it.
Old guy #1: In my day, we made our CPUs out of crystals! Our motherboard was a clay tablet. And we hammered the gold into thin sheets, baked it in a dung-fired oven, and we LIKED it.
Old guy #2: Luxury. Back when I was a young'en, we didn't have any o' those fancy crystals, ovens or precious metals. We 'ad to make due with a bunch o' stones, manipulating the electrons by hand!
Old guy #1: The TRUE geek makes his own from a brick of silver. In my day we had to make thermal paste by grinding it down with stones.
Old guy #2: Silver bricks? You was lucky! In my day we had mine our own ore and smelt it down. Then our dad would assay it, and if it wasn't 99% pure, all we got for breakfast was CompUSA Silver Thermal Grease!
Old guy #3: You had HEAVY ELEMENTS? In my day, the loose clouds of interstellar gas hadn't coalesced into star systems yet. All we had were hydrogen atoms and maybe a trace of helium around Christmas!
Old guy #4: You had loose clouds of interstellar gas. *LUXURY* In my day we had nothing but the vacuum and had to wait for a universe to pop into existence before we could even begin to think about the existence of energy and matter. Kids today ....
/misc | Feb 25, 2007