Its fun to make fun of legacy systems. Just calling them bigiron is mocking themiron smacks of heavy, ancient, and rusty. Wordslike ironclad, iron lung, and Old Ironsides come to mindnot tomention Raymond Burr.

But computers are one of the few things people complain aboutgetting older. Some other appliances get bragged about. My friendToms parents use a couple of 60-year-old Electrolux vacuums thatwork as well today as when they were new. They sucked in 1943, andthey suck now, he likes to say.

Although they may not actively tout the age of the things theyuse, most people are perfectly happy with old technology exceptwhen it comes to computers.

The QWERTY keyboard in front of most of us is a perfect example.It was designed in 1874designed, in fact, to compensate for poormachining technology of the time (it would cause letters to jam).Machining has gotten better, but not the keyboards. Except for thefew Dvorak users out there, though, no one thinks of them as legacykeyboards.

The phone on your desk may have three dozen buttons and a60-page users manual, but in the end it still uses the sametwo-wire back end that Elisha Gray used for his telephone (or, ifyou prefer, Alexander Graham Bell). That was in 1876. Grays phonewould probably work in a home today.

Xbox, schmexboxthe fad today for the over-25 is old video games.Asteroids, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and their ilk are in the midstof a major comebacknot to mention classic Atari 2600 games likeAdventure and Combat. Go to www.classicgaming.com and getone of dozens of game emulators (MAME is probably the most popular)so you can play them on your PC, knowing that your video card alonehas more power than the Atari ever did.

If you want a classy writing instrument, go with a fountain penatechnology thats been around for almost two centuries. (For thereally classy, go with a dipping pen, like the $675 Jorg Hysekpictured.) Ballpoints are so, well, Bic.

About half the people I know (including me) drive cars withstick shiftsfive-speed manual transmissions. Automatics have beenaround since 1940 (Oldsmobiles Hydra-Matic), but sticks have thatcertain I-dont-know-what. No one calls them legacytransmissions.

Of course, the good old stuff isnt just technology. Remakes ofclassic (and not so classic) movies always seem to be around, alongwith modern interpretations of Shakespearian plays. (All that tellsme is that some Hollywood writer was too lazy to come up with hisown plot and had to reuse one from the 20thor 16thcentury.)

When you cant remake something, theres always the re-releaseStarWars and E.T. come to mind. Big news: The 20th anniversarycollectors edition of Tron is out on DVDsources say it could be thebiggest-selling Disney DVD of all time. The sequel (Tron 2.0,natch) is already in the works. This time the bad guy isI kid younota search engine.

Complain as people may about computers from the 70s, styles fromthose years (the decade that time tried to forget) dont seem towant to go away. Kids these daysdont they know we stopped dressinglike that for a reason? Big daisies, bell-bottoms, and badhairstyles somehow went from being kitsch to being retro. Theyrepre-post modern!

The point is, the next time youre ready to put down the big ironin the basement, or make fun of someone whos creeping along withonly an 800-MHz machine, think about all the old technology thatsstill working as well today as everand the fact that youre probablyreading this on paper.

ANDREW KANTOR