Back in 1993, I went to get another degree to just to get internet access, which was one of the few ways to get it back then. We had VAX and Unix, both fine platforms, hundreds of students would log in to one CPU from a terminal on campus or the house. We were connected to the world and communications were fast. I remember that's when the entire continent of Australia was connected by a pair of 2MB cables at the time. We had many distributed servers for news, email, IRC, gopher, etc, but it was lightning fast. Engineers at companies put tech documents on ftp servers. The internet was a big world library and the world was free. #JavaScript wasn't invented yet to slow us down or bury us in popups and advertisements. The entire internet was ad-free and advertising was a ban offense.
Then one morning I remember what would be known as #EternalSeptember, thanks to #AOL. And the #CanterSiegel spam happened. And the real cranks invaded. Many of us banned every .com address to regain sanity. This is when investors invaded the internet to hype it up into television quality. At least we still have #Wikipedia, #InternetArchive, and #Mastodon. Watching #Bluesky open up the floodgates to fascists was obvious to those of us who remember the past.