madbaker | Generation gap, sorta

Friday night I went to an alumni cocktail reception for a relatively new institute the college set up - it's a quantitative economics program, so right up my alley. I would have done that track in a heartbeat if they'd had it when I was there. Reasonable chattage with folks there, although I was the only alum from anywhere close to my era.

At one point, I was talking to four seniors. So, they're about 20 years old. I was explaining how two days before our semester-long econometrics regression project was due, the VAX crashed, and they hadn't made a backup since before the semester started.

After about five minutes, one of them got up the courage to ask me "So, what's a vax?"
The others piped in, obviously relieved, "Yeah, was it a kind of intranet?"

(pause)

"No, it was a mainframe system. We didn't have an intranet back in the late '80s. See, PCs didn't have the power to run computational packages, and..."

"What's a mainframe? Was that a forerunner of Excel?"

(pause)
Eventually, I told them to look it up.