First, I would put the birth of New World computing at 2007, with the introduction of the iPhone. You could even arguably stretch it a bit further back to the birth of “Web 2.0†applications in the early 2000s. But it’s brand new. If computers in general are young, New World computing is fresh out of the womb, covered in blood and screaming.
This is how things change. The iMac killed the floppy and all the other legacy ports we *had to have* only to introduce a brand new way of thinking about connectivity. The iPhone destroyed my own notion of what I needed in a platform and the iPad is currently destroying (that is in the present progressive tense for a reason) the idea of the "desktop metaphor." I am daring people to say it isn't the right direction.
Well the new world old world division in that post you quote here seems pretty akin to digital natives/milenials and all that nonsense. I really don;t buy into the orgins idea here, and I’m not so sure that the device define the platform, rather how we access that. And in answer to that question should be whether it is through an open framework (wether a laptop, touchscreen, phone, etc.) or the gateway tributaries that are using rhetoric like this to pretend they are the future. They aren;t the future unless we accept them as so, and I for one do not, because we are confusing the deice with the platform, and that is dangerous.