I guess he was just going for nostalgia, but I admit to being surprised that people are still mirroring that. I've only had to reverse a few things, but I have to say that that old information is still good, because it wasn't about specific technology, but it was a more general sort of reasoning backwards that allowed you to infer the inner workings of something by looking at it from the outside. Even when I'm not trying to reverse something, I find it useful: by reasoning about how things probably work internally, I can sometimes discover features that no one bothered to document or things like that.