That situation you describe never actually happened, except maybe during the very first few hours, days or weeks after the Web's birth. Remember bandwidth, mac

That situation you describe never actually happened, except maybe during the very first few hours, days or weeks after the Web's birth. Remember bandwidth, machines and access used to cost way more back then than they do now, so resource owners wanted to get the best bang for their buck from the get go. Note that resource owners means those who actually paid for network resources (companies, administrations, schools, labs), not people who merely benefitted from them for free because of their positions (teachers, students, lab rats etc) You seem to be the unfortunate victim of a false memory, a similar phenomenon to that experienced by the "things used to be better" crowd.