People talk about the early days of the Internet, then only go back as far as the world wide web.

There was Internet before Web servers.

When I think of the early Internet, I'm usually thinking of USENET. Posting a question about a Linux device driver not working, getting an answer back from the guy who wrote it, and then him fixing it to work with your hardware.

If I think of the early web, it was very exciting. Mosaic was the browser, and HTML was clean. Briefly, it was almost pure information and untainted by profit motive.

Anyone with a server on the Internet (an extremely exclusive group) could install a web server and start their own site. It was very populist among the privileged few who could participate.

There were assholes. There are always assholes. But there were very few stupid assholes. The nature of the early Internet meant there was a certain threshold you had to cross before you had access. Then, AOL came, and stupid assholes arrived.

It's been downhill ever since.

Now GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

Edit: typo