> 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.

[1] https://lwn.net/

The authors of that article got pictured on the cover of the New York Times for finding that security issue: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/technology/researchers-fi...