You are old indeed.

I once tried to ask Whit why the NIST competition only wanted block ciphers and not stream ciphers, but I worded the question wrong and the answer was "Because that was what the competition specified". I was embarrassed and didn't correct the question, and he noticed but didn't really have a good reason but clearly thought block ciphers were the only reasonable way. Now we have some excellent well-regarded stream ciphers.