FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.
FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
Putting Windows [3.11] on top of DOS is like putting whipped cream on a road apple [horse poop].
Taxpayers have spent more than $200 billion in the last decade on computer systems that are antiquated, incompatible, and not doing the job.
Think of the first Apple II being shipped in 1977. It took almost a decade for it to land in my school where I could see it.
People have SMS, right? It stinks. It's a dead technology, like a fax machine left over from the Seventies, sitting there as a cash cow for carriers.
From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it.
Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that.
Broadcast TV is like the landline of 20 years ago.
I don't have a computer. A computer's a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.
There are lots of reasons email persists, even as faster and simpler forms of communication proliferate and your personal communications likely have mostly migrated elsewhere. But one big one is that new types of media channels rarely totally kill off old ones, even though everyone predicts they will.
I have this famous joke that I use: Why was God able to create Heaven and Earth in seven days and seven nights? Because he didn't have installed customers and legacy technology to worry about.
I'm not terribly technological. I'm awfully backward about iPads and BlackBerries and suchlike; I still have a great fondness for Teletext, and I clung onto my fax machine for as long as I could, but eventually you have to move with the times.
The printed word will be around long after many of our digital creations are gone, either because books don't require monthly hosting, and blogs and websites do... or because the languages and platforms for which a particular digital creation was published will become obsolete.
When a technology is replaced by another technology, the previous technology either becomes art or it dies.
I am greatly proud of the fact that 'Doom' is one of those things where everything that has a 32-bit processor has had 'Doom' run on it, and I think that's been one of the great aspects of having it be open source: having everything out there means that people have maintained that and kept it up to date.
So much information lacks a good way to store it, especially when it's all digital; sometimes it requires old technology to go back and retrieve it.
An era similar to the one in which the black rotary phone dominated its product category may not recur anytime soon.
