> Well in 2001 you had 1+ Ghz CPUs at the high end being pretty popular with 1600x1200 resolution. If you were using a 300 MHz PII I'm guessing you had a 800x600 monitor attached to it as well (if that). Today, monitors that are ~1900x1200 are common (if not more - 4k & multi-monitor is also really popular).

Your history is off. The PII came out in late 1997. Mine came with a Riva 128, which did 32-bit color in 3D. I ran it at 1152x864x32-bit. Typical resolution back then was 1024x768 (for 15" or 17" monitor) to 1600x1200 (for 21") in True Color. Full HD, which is probably the most common resolution today (especially because laptops are more common than desktops now), takes only twice as much memory. And of course, JPG was a thing back then too, and the size of a JPG increases sub-linearly with resolution/color depth.

> The web back then was also a wasteland of bad graphics & terrible UX (things aren't universally better but they are vastly better).

Precisely the opposite. This was the New York Times home page in 2001: http://www.versionmuseum.com/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_Ti.... Look how easy it was to find where everything was! (Hey, remember when websites were so deferential to native UI guidelines that they used native widgets for check boxes and radio buttons? Pepperidge Farm remembers!) The current website is pretty good, but strictly worse. For example, instead of distinctly colored, clearly visible section headers as in 2001 ("Inside," "Reader's Opinion"), today's site ditches the header background color and uses text that's smaller than the headline text. That makes the page seem like a sea of headlines with no obvious section groupings.

HN/Wikipedia is way easier to browse than your typical site today. That's what the whole web was like back then--just links, text, and images. Maybe some native text-entry boxes, radio buttons, etc. Not all of this garbage where stuff is hidden and then suddenly pops up or is behind a hamburger menu, scrolling is broken by custom JS, text is all replaced with inscrutable icons, texture/borders/outlines are dropped so groupings can't be identified, etc.

> E-commerce is now a given rather than an obscure thing geeks do. Interactive media/video, video chat, etc are all things that are possible.

In 2001, we had Amazon.
The website was better than today, with color-contrasting tabs and headings everywhere. (I'd link a picture, but "copy link to image" doesn't actually work anymore--another way the web is broken today.) Yes, fewer people used Amazon back then. That's the result of manufacturing technology making computers more affordable, not changes in web design.

> Additionally, security has costs. The OS you were running on your 300 MHz PII was faster because it wasn't properly isolating processes from each other.

Again, your history is off. Even Windows 9x ran most apps in protected mode. (There were loopholes for compatibility, but those didn't help performance.) And by 2001, I was running BeOS/Windows 2k on that machine. Windows 2k is still the best OS Microsoft has ever made.

> You can complain all you want of course but the complaints are pretty "why can't things stay the way they were" rather than a recognition that advancement has tradeoffs (e.g. cars are more polluting than horses but it's revolutionized & democratized travel & made it orders of magnitude more efficient in a way not possible before).

Right. Except the modern web isn't a car. It's a horse in drag. Almost all of the "revolution" has come not from changes in web technology, but (1) manufacturing advances making computers cheaper/smaller/faster; and (2) advances in broadband and wireless making connectivity ubiquitous.