Although the article itself is quite old by now, I find the techniques rather interesting. My own modern games still work on Windows 98 (not 95, sorry) with DirectX 7 level hardware and sometimes it can be challenging to accomplish a cool effect that would be trivial in a vertex and/or pixel shader.

Though to be honest, I'm starting to worry a little about support for the fixed function pipeline being deprecated/removed in drivers or at the API middleware level. I would assume that, in modern versions of the APIs, they end up emulating the FF pipeline using shaders.