I remember hating that Netscape banner at the top of their page because it took so damn long to load over a 28.8 (my rural phone lines only got to 31.2 on a "good day" once I got a 56k).
"In 1996, the New York Times website was dead set on getting users to sign up to access any Web content at all."
They've since opened up most of their site, but it's so frustrating that a good chunk of their content still requires you to sign-up.
The old Yahoo reminds me of craigslist, and the old Lycos reminds me of Google. Perhaps not so much has changed. Links, text and simple forms still rule.
Nobody will miss the wild, eye-poping javascript "cool scripts", which were primer experiments on what could javascript deliver. It's so good people have learned some common sense (and the invention of NoScript firefox extension!)