"In my day, we didn't have all this 'pre-emptive multitasking' and 'symmetric multiprocessing' hoo-haa. When you wanted to run more than one application, your background tasks could slow to a crawl, or stop altogether-- and we liked it. We loved it. Pre-emptive multitasking was for candy-butt wussies who couldn't deal with the bracing feel of total computing stasis when a menu was clicked down. And if you wanted the power of more than one processor, you waited until the companies who made the application you used decided to make their products multiprocessor-aware, and then you waited for Apple to release a multiprocessor Mac, which damn near never happened. But it built character. And we liked it."

Sound familiar? Probably not-- because we poor Mac users still deal with using an "old and creaky" operating system all the time. We are the Buzzword Challenged; we endure the pain of cooperative multitasking and single-processor systems every day of our pathetic little lives. (Never mind that studies show Mac users to be more productive and happier with their computing tasks than users of other operating systems; the fact that an elegant and consistent interface and attention to detail appears to affect overall user productivity and satisfaction more than "modern operating system features" is totally beside the point. If you don't have buzzwords like "symmetric multiprocessing" and "protected memory," you're a dinosaur.)

But the fact is, we might be ranting endlessly about the Buzzwordless Days sooner than we expected. Sure, Mac OS X will deliver all those modern features in late 1999, but now according to AppleInsider, Mac OS 8.6 (code-named "Veronica") may also gain some of those features when it surfaces in the spring. 8.6 reportedly will contain a new nanokernel supporting "full symmetric multiprocessor capability and will feature a high performance preemption-safe memory allocator," and "integrated multitasking," which (we will go out on a very long limb to surmise) may be "pre-emptive" instead of "cooperative." And then we Old-Timers will tell all those Mac OS 8.6-using kids about the "good old days," when you could pause your whole Mac by holding the mouse button down.