I feel like there's always a little crotchetyness in older engineers. I remember being in school right when companies were putting all of their literature online. For electronics, that was such a huge leap forward from having to buy entire books of data sheets for integrated circuits. People on the other side of that divide had the same complaint about a different subject.
"You only looked through the data sheet for 4 hours? Back in my day it might take 4 hours to get the thing to even turn on!"