51 years young, so I guess that makes me the 'Grand Old Man' here.
Had my first job in a computer dept back in 1972 - then left for the hippy trail. Serious geek since 1975 - IBM mainframes that filled rooms (heck, even the printer controllers were the size of a Transit van, tape drives the size of a wardrobe). This was before every man and his dog thought they were programmers. Then the WWW came along and everyone found out how much money we made, and how much fun we had as well.
"Love the 80's" ?? Sorry, I despise them. Bad politics (Thatcher/Reagan), bad music (New Romantics!! sic), bad clothes (but not as bad as the 70s), and lousy dope.
PHP in 2001, but back to 'hard-core' computing (WAN/LAN and backend databases) once the .com bubble burst. Now I'm developing web tools for on-line tracking of work for our clients, and PHP is still the tool of choice. Even if it were not the best server scripting language around, the community spirit and support that comes with it would tip the balance for me.
Glad to be back in the UNIX world is all I can say: I've been stuck in the MickeySoft wonderland (W2K) for the last 3 years.