This was part of my point. The longer one lives and is even technically adept in a cursory manner, the more one sees how tech is rarely revolutionary and more incremental. The thing is, I worked in the Globe building in the early '90s; they had a rudimentary page layout system (Harris) dating from the late '70s and an ugly but equally functional program to copy edit and partially format text (ATEX). Ms. Wente would have been familiar and presumably adept at these technologies, even though they would have appeared pretty cutting-edge to offices getting used to Windows 3.1 and WordPerfect 5.

Perhaps the column isn't about tech and more about the willingness to learn new things.