The question should be closed, the fact that it was asked when the rules were slightly more relaxed is irrelevant. Right now it's a broken window and sends the wrong idea about what the site is about and what kind of questions we welcome.
We can't blame the new guy for posting an answer. He found an open question he could answer and went for it, that's exactly what we want new users to do. Posting a comment berating him for answering a "not constructive" question would be awful (even if we are extremely polite about it), we can't really expect new users to have the slightest idea of what "not constructive" means for us.
Lastly, I don't think the question qualifies for a historical lock. It's not stellar, it doesn't have tons of inbound links, most of the answers are not particularly useful (some were, but have since aged) and there are quite a few higher quality duplicates around (two are even linked to in the question). I don't really see any reason to delete it, but I wouldn't really care if it was. But it should certainly be closed.