The best way to rob a bank is to own one.

Pong to Atari 8 bit
Atari to MS Dos
MS Dos to Windows
Windows to Linux (in progress)

Some of us loved that obsolete software.

All of these programs ran in MS DOS, itself on of the great programs. Sorry, Microsoft haters, but at that point in my life, DOS was they only operating system I knew.

Q&A was a word processor and database (sort of). It had the totally cool feature of being able to add a list of figures in a document! It did macros.

Borland C After giving up on Microsoft C, someone gave me a copy of Borland C which had the advantage that it actually worked.

Telix was a full featured shareware comm program that was written by 17 year old! It was the best one out there at the time.

Norton Disk Doctor and Spinrite to keep the hard drive going.

Dirmagic was a program that handled files and directories instead of using the clunk dos commands.

Lemmings - Just plain fun.

Star Control 2 Great space game that told a story

DesqView and QEMM Allowed you to multitask in DOS.

The ick of making friends with someone who's visibly old. ???? Most of us old farts don't wear adult diapers, don't have old man smell, and if you actually talked to us, you might just find out that we have insights and ideas worth hearing.

Think about this. Someday you will be old. When that day comes, do you want people to think of you as "Icky"??

Neither of the candidates represent me. I am a liberal who wants maximum freedom. While I will vote peace and freedom, I have much more in common with both the peace and freedom part and the libertarian party than either the democrats or the republicans.

Both the democrats and the republicans are owned by special interests (read people richer that 99% of the people). It's not even a secret. the solicit campaign contributions (bribes) openly.

So why give either one your vote?

I think you are mistaking George for Santorum!

I recently worked at a company that had 286 computers running on the production line. They have plenty of smart people working there. We ended up buying one on Ebay (a great source for obsolete hardware).

I have no doubt that hardware and software that works with XP will be available for a very long time.

As to whether it is better to upgrade the XP applications, or replace them is a decision that needs to be made. In some cases it makes sense to upgrade.
  In the example I gave, we bought several spares on ebay. that cost around $300 that should keep the machine running for the forseeable future. Replacement of the machine would have cost upward of $100,000.

Rather than a book or game why not set him up with the developing environment for something that interests him?

Ms Dos. Multitasking was done through Desq View with QEMM as a memory manager.

I remember star trek on the atari 800. It took over 20 minutes to load from the cassette drive. You got to shoot at Klingons. It seemed so cool back then.

A salesman needs two skills. One is the ability to sell, the people skills. In addition he needs deep product knowledge. If you are selling development tools, you need to understand development and exactly how these tools will make the programmers more productive.

It is not unusual to require multiple skills for a job. How is this any different?

I have often been approached by salespeople with little product knowledge. They never succeed in selling me stuff.

When I am interested in a technical product, I call the engineer. Usually they can quickly get me the information I need to make a purchasing decision.

This is already happening. Eli Pariser did a talk on Ted talks about this very topic.

Google and Facebook tailor results to the person the results are provided for. Here is the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szaJsXT6q9Q&feature=g-like&context=G2ed170eALTxxsHgANAA

The point is that if you have knowledge you will be way ahead of those that do not! Not all engineering jobs can or will be sent overseas. There is plenty of opportunity for intelligent engineers and techs here in the U.S.

There are fewer good choices for the uneducated.