Its fun to make fun of legacy systems. Just calling them big iron is mocking themiron smacks of heavy, ancient, and rusty. Words like ironclad, iron lung, and Old Ironsides come to mindnot to mention Raymond Burr.
But computers are one of the few things people complain about getting older. Some other appliances get bragged about. My friend Toms parents use a couple of 60-year-old Electrolux vacuums that work as well today as when they were new. They sucked in 1943, and they suck now, he likes to say.
Although they may not actively tout the age of the things they use, most people are perfectly happy with old technology except when it comes to computers.
The QWERTY keyboard in front of most of us is a perfect example. It was designed in 1874designed, in fact, to compensate for poor machining technology of the time (it would cause letters to jam). Machining has gotten better, but not the keyboards. Except for the few Dvorak users out there, though, no one thinks of them as legacy keyboards.
The phone on your desk may have three dozen buttons and a 60-page users manual, but in the end it still uses the same two-wire back end that Elisha Gray used for his telephone (or, if you prefer, Alexander Graham Bell). That was in 1876. Grays phone would probably work in a home today.
Xbox, schmexboxthe fad today for the over-25 is old video games. Asteroids, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and their ilk are in the midst of a major comebacknot to mention classic Atari 2600 games like Adventure and Combat. Go to www.classicgaming.com and get one of dozens of game emulators (MAME is probably the most popular) so you can play them on your PC, knowing that your video card alone has more power than the Atari ever did.
If you want a classy writing instrument, go with a fountain pena technology thats been around for almost two centuries. (For the really classy, go with a dipping pen, like the $675 Jorg Hysek pictured.) Ballpoints are so, well, Bic.
About half the people I know (including me) drive cars with stick shiftsfive-speed manual transmissions. Automatics have been around since 1940 (Oldsmobiles Hydra-Matic), but sticks have that certain I-dont-know-what. No one calls them legacy transmissions.
Of course, the good old stuff isnt just technology. Remakes of classic (and not so classic) movies always seem to be around, along with modern interpretations of Shakespearian plays. (All that tells me is that some Hollywood writer was too lazy to come up with his own plot and had to reuse one from the 20thor 16thcentury.)
When you cant remake something, theres always the re-releaseStar Wars and E.T. come to mind. Big news: The 20th anniversary collectors edition of Tron is out on DVDsources say it could be the biggest-selling Disney DVD of all time. The sequel (Tron 2.0, natch) is already in the works. This time the bad guy isI kid you nota search engine.
Complain as people may about computers from the 70s, styles from those years (the decade that time tried to forget) dont seem to want to go away. Kids these daysdont they know we stopped dressing like that for a reason? Big daisies, bell-bottoms, and bad hairstyles somehow went from being kitsch to being retro. Theyre pre-post modern!
The point is, the next time youre ready to put down the big iron in the basement, or make fun of someone whos creeping along with only an 800-MHz machine, think about all the old technology thats still working as well today as everand the fact that youre probably reading this on paper.
ANDREW KANTOR
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