Windows 3000

Mumbai: Today, I caught up with my old friend of mine, Saurav Guha Maulik, my school classmate almost throughout the 90s. He is one of those very few guys I used to hang around with in Calcutta. I cannot recollect the number of times we both walked all the way from school to our homes in Lake Gardens, an 8 km long journey. At the time, time existed till infinity. A very kind hearted person by nature (though used to be childishly-bully at times) and enormous bullock-like strength, I've never laughed so much as I have had with him. Its been eight years since we kept in touch, after I parted off to Trivandrum in '99. But the one single thing that I later kept telling others was this conversation that we had in '96, shortly after the release of Independence Day. Saurav saw the mega-blockbuster right after the release while I, a few weeks later. We were talking about the movie and then came the serious "hi-tech" discussion. [ Window 95, which was just becoming common and popular at the time there, was another talked about topic ].

Me: I don't understand how a computer virus made by humans on earth could've been written to enter an alien's computer.
Saurav: I know, this ridiculous.
Me: I mean, the architecture would be totally different from ours.
Saurav: Exactly, they've just made some stupid concept.
Me: I mean, even the basic elements could be different, like they must have elements that aren't even found in our periodic table. (yes, I was a dodo in chemistry)
Saurav: Yaaaaaa.
Me: Like, how can Jeff (Goldblum) have created something so soon that can easily connect to a outer-space hardware system and deploy the virus, which is a software, and then run it ? Its nonsense.
Saurav: Yaaaaa. Its bullshit. Who knows, the aliens could have been so advanced that they could been using Windows 3000
Me: <Blank>

I did try explaining to him why they couldn't be using Windows 3000 - but not the part of time-travel.