One thing that fascinated me early on was how the web was equal: <famous-company>.com had exactly the same lame, gray-with-text-and-slow-images site as some sil

One thing that fascinated me early on was how the web was equal: <famous-company>.com had exactly the same lame, gray-with-text-and-slow-images site as some silly student web site. Or sometimes worse, as students had lots of time to fiddle around with HTML and Netscape, and companies hadn’t yet amassed entire organizations devoted to web presence. :) Most sites were also utilitarian; aside from maybe a logo here or there, they just gave you what you wanted (since they literally did not have much else). You really noticed image-loading. Each image gradually rendered into view, and sites still knew how to use them judiciously. And yet, since we’d never seen anything quite like it, we patiently waited to load every time. It was too cool to be a bother. The most mind-blowing thing was that you didn’t really need to know much to connect. I didn’t need network numbers or other weird stuff. I could simply guess a dot-com for something, and there it was! It wasn’t material printed in a book or mailed to me, it was just there, right when I asked, like a personal butler. At the time it was astounding.