Google's wonderful new Ngram Viewer allows Internet users to search a huge corpus of scanned books from 1800 to 2008, searching them by word and graphing the results over time. This is far more awesome than it sounds, because it allows us to chart the history of all sorts of things. And, of course, to settle bar bets.

For instance: which is superior, Mac or PC? And how would we decide? Thanks to Google, we have at least one new metric for these kinds of ridiculous arguments. Here it is:

More seriously, it's possible to chart the rise and fall of various Web browsers over the years, with the caveat that "Opera" had to be excluded because its other meaning was way too common.

We can also chart a few major operating systems across the years; behold the death of DOS and the rise of Linux!

Programming languages? We can do those, too (though "C" was left out because it eclipses all others; I suspect Ngrams is picking up many non-computer uses of the latter).

Then there are the computers that defined my childhood (though VIC-20 hardly registered, poor thing).

Even better: a graph of senior staff names from 1800 through 2000. (Again, "Peter" and "John" had to be left out, since they squashed the rest of us into utter irrelevance.) Eric had a great run around 1865, then sadly fell into disrepute for decades.

Those of us with less common names, upon seeing this graph, immediately joined forces as minority figures; when the Appellation Revolution comes, John, Peter, and Ben will be first against the wall (you have been warned!).