> This was written in 1996. The language used feels already much different from today's publications. God I feel old.
That depends on which publications you're looking at, just as it did in 1996. An article from LWN [1] today, for example, reads in a fairly similar style. Maybe slightly less stuffy, because it's targeted at a slightly more general audience.
Randomness and the Netscape Browser January 1996 Dr. Dobb's Journal
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/ddj-netscape.ht...
This was written in 1996. The language used feels already much different from today's publications. God I feel old.