OMG I have so had this conversation more than a few times with other geeks… normally it goes something like this:
- [Random reference to some technology, such as a programming IDE]
- Yea, well back in my day we didn’t have no steeking IDE, we used EMACS and were happy with it!
- Oh yea, well back in my day we had VIM
- Vim!? Luxury! We had VI and we loved it!
- VI? Why back in my day we had ed!
- Ed? Luxury! I used to use ‘cat’ and we were happy.
[This is where my real life deviates from the comic] - Cat?! My god man you lived such a pampered life, I used to write the binary code directly to disk with ‘echo’.
- Echo! We used to use binary
- BINARY! You had both one’s and zeros? Luxury! We only had zeros and we liked it!
- You had zeros! We used to have to use the magnetic pull of the moon to manipulate bits on the hard drive.
- You had a hard drive!?!?!
- [… and so on….]
I do have to say that I love XKCD! They have some good stuff in the forums as well.
Oh, and just for my coworker Len….. “PICO!” (in reference to ‘nano’ in the comic).