The web back then was also useless. I know because I was there trying to learn programming, or anything, from the web of 1996-2000 and it was a freaking pain,

The web back then was also useless. I know because I was there trying to learn programming, or anything, from the web of 1996-2000 and it was a freaking pain, a garbage dump of poor content filled with banner ads and popups and searching on AltaVista and Yahoo! was completely futile. The only useful content I found was not on the web, but in FTP directories. And learning was all you could (barely) do. People were doing bookmarks because it was rare to find something good, so remembering stuff that wasn't crap was worthwhile. People tend to glorify the old days. That's because memory starts playing tricks on us.