An old question from an alleged old man.

[Daot Lagorille]

So I am at work the other day, and my phone rings:

*bleat* (it doesn't actually sound like a sheep, but I don't care)

It was a colleague of mine, who sort of helped get me started in the whole crazy web-development thing. Now, I'll preface this by saying that this dude has probably forgetten more about strategy gaming than I am ever likely to know, but more importantly, he has been involved in the "big web design game in the sky", by which I mean "on earth" as he is not dead, since day 1, i.e. 1995 or so. The conversation went something....


like this:

Colleage (hereafter to be refered to as "Cap'n Web"): Oh hey man I was just calling to get your input on something as the [name of site withheld to protect the identity of designer, in this case me] site is having some problems.

The site being referred to is one I started in 1999 and after moving on to greener, albeit more cow****-filled pastures, it grew in size, having been maintained by others, and is quite a successful online service - kind of like an advice column that is somewhat abrasive and ultimately unhelpful

Me (hereafter to be referred to as Mr. LaGorille): Oh yeah, eh. Uhh...is this like technical kind of input, or more kind of policy-ish direction...*fades, having lost train of thought*

Cap'n Web: Well I just wanted to give your name to the current guy (a universal term meaning the poor bastard whose job it currently is to webmaster this site), cause a problem came up the other day, and I figured since, well you're like a Grandaddy now - the site's been up for what...4 years now?

Mr. LaGorille (hereafter to be referred to as Reluctant Grandpaw): What.

I'll stop here to avoid embarrassing myself further, but the point of all that crap I just wrote, and hopefully you skipped over, is to ask the age old question:

What in cyberland is "old" and what is "new"? How long does one have to have been around in this bi'niss to be considered a veteran?

I mean, in real estate, it is at least 75-80 years, I think. I will now sit down and hand this over to the peanut gallery, as my arthritis is acting up again...

[DaveSW]

As I see it, I believe this tiny part constitutes your question :D


Originally posted by Daot Lagorille
What in cyberland is "old" and what is "new"? How long does one have to have been around in this bi'niss to be considered a veteran?

Old, is something no longer in use by the majority. Like windows 95, and maybe windows 98 when it falls a bit lower. By this line of reasoning, old is something over around 6 years.

However, in terms of your hardware, old is something over 12 months new, because the tax man only counts it for 12 months.

To be a veteran of course is different. You could build websites for 5 years and still be hopeless at coding. So a veteran must be someone who's good at solving problems...

LOL

[Robert Wellock]

I like your last sentence Dave.

[Dark Dragon]

Old, is something no longer in use by the majority. Like windows 95, and maybe windows 98 when it falls a bit lower

Oh come now..I use Windows 98 SE and it works just fine! Not like 2000 where you have all sorts of wonderful glitches and security holes to play with. :D

[DaveSW]

Hey Rob - I was trying to find a way to let me be a 'veteran' too ;) lol

emm DD, actually I use ME... Thing is, how many new pcs do you see sold with windows 98 on them? not many! The laws of computing state that the machines it's on are going to get old and be replaced with new ones with XP on them... Except for all those people who find XP too hard to pirate ofcourse! They might stick to 98...

[couchmonkey]

As a matter of fact, I think Windows 98 is still being used by a lot of people.

I consider "old" in the web business to be someone who remembers a time before .coms started going public en masse. Someone who remembers when everything was free yet miraculously nobody was bankrupt.

Of course that's a pretty business-minded way of putting it.

How about someone who remembers when CSS and DHTML were the brand-new things?

A few fond memories that date me:
-my excitement when frames were introduced
-my excitement when Netscape was introduced
-the time I handed in a research paper and my computer teacher was shocked to hear that I did the research on the internet

[Charles]

The first program that I ran was typed on punch cards and I remember the days when we could only address 64K. I just recently removed 8080 Assembly language from my resume.

I don't by new computers, I just keep upgrading parts of this one so I'm still using Windows 98. And one of my two hard drives was built in the 1970s.

[Daot Lagorille]

*silence, save for sweet chirping of crickets*

Oh my god. Charles...I...I...

So that is what old means.

*is enlightened*

*feels young*

[DaveSW]

Originally posted by Charles
one of my two hard drives was built in the 1970s.

How many megabytes can you store on it?