The good old days...

The good old days...  They weren't really so good.  I'm with Lenore Skenazy (WSJ$) on this (I remember well how boring the backs of those cereal boxes were!).  I'll take our online world over the alleged “good old days” of libraries and book stores.  In the pre-Internet era, I spent a lot of time in musty libraries and browsing in book stores.  While there are a few aspects I miss about them, the key word there is “few” – the advantages of instant information availability on today's web, and of electronic book readers (the iPad is my current preferred platform) completely overwhelms any nostalgia I feel for the old days.  To reinforce that, all I need do is remember how much I hated the always screwed-up, always out-of-date card indexes in technical libraries.  Nope, I don't want to go back there...