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I’m an official Old Person (I turned 52 last month). According to the AARP, that means that I am now officially entitled to complain that back in my day, things used to be better. I am suspicious of this impulse! When I started dialing BBSes in the early 1980s, the Old Hands there told me that it was all downhill after acoustic couplers and that modems were degrading the noosphere into a fallen paradise. When I got on Usenet a couple years later, every disagreement would feature some Unix Greybeard telling us that the Fidonet gateway had opened the floodgates for dumbass kids like me who were stinking up the joint and adding nothing of value. By the time I joined The WELL in the late 1980s, it was too late: the rarified Athenian agora had been overrun by barbarians and the Age of Reason was over. Then there was the Eternal September, the moral degeneracy of menuing systems and the wicked temptations of a GUI. I even got in on the act, explaining “Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either).” Here’s the thing: all those other Cranky Olds complaining that we were on a greased slide to Hell were wrong. I was right.