> I started with B2B credits in FC and told him "Fibre Channel uses exactly the same approach as hop-by-hop windows we had in X.25, with the same results…" resulting in confused blank stare. Further down the conversation I said "FCoE uses lossless Ethernet, which uses PAUSE frames, which are exactly the same thing as Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q on an async link." Same result.
Or -- to play contrarian/devil's-advocate -- perhaps you should find more ways to convey these timeless logical concepts that don't depend on ancient war-stories or shared-suffering involving "dead" technologies? I'm not saying you have to turn your baseball cap sideways and start saying "dawg", but effective communication means you need to update your metaphors and analogies at least once in a decade as your audience changes.
If the past contains useful lessons, sometimes the best thing you (i.e. direct contemporaries who were there) can do is to isolate the most important, broadly-useful parts, and cut them loose from the gnarly matrix of specifics. Then you can teach the lesson over and over in a way that doesn't depend on audiences who worked with Tech X from years Y to Z.
Or -- to play contrarian/devil's-advocate -- perhaps you should find more ways to convey these timeless logical concepts that don't depend on ancient war-stories or shared-suffering involving "dead" technologies? I'm not saying you have to turn your baseball cap sideways and start saying "dawg", but effective communication means you need to update your metaphors and analogies at least once in a decade as your audience changes.
If the past contains useful lessons, sometimes the best thing you (i.e. direct contemporaries who were there) can do is to isolate the most important, broadly-useful parts, and cut them loose from the gnarly matrix of specifics. Then you can teach the lesson over and over in a way that doesn't depend on audiences who worked with Tech X from years Y to Z.