ahlschwede

Just to encourage people who might otherwise be discouraged by your post - I completed my CS Masters at 44. While it was time consuming, I found it rather refreshing compared to normal work.

Work is full of ambiguities and complexities whereas academic work has straightforward success criteria and you're always starting from a blank slate. I enjoyed it, but I was also lucky to have the support of my family to spend my time that way.

Most non-technical people don't share the same definition of obsolete. I know a few people who have gone more than 10 years between hardware purchases using Apple computers.

Before Ajax one way to do Web 2.0 style interactions was to hide a Java applet in an invisible iFrame and feed data back and forth from the page using JavaScript.

I think people forget that the early web had a proliferation of plug-ins. JavaScript was most often used as glue between HTML and plug-ins which had fewer platform incompatibilities than the browsers. One of the reasons Flash became the dominant plug-in was because it was universal enough to duplicate the features of other plug-ins, including asynchronous communication via Java applet.