To an oldster like me, this is already post classic internet, where the "golden" era was that of Usenet, and the web was just one interesting new use of the internet.

Which begs the obvious question - to those whose internet values are formed in the current era, will this feel like a lost "golden era" 30 years from now?

> I used 2012 as an example because that's when I was in my first year of high school

I don't think this person has the experience required to make a qualifiable judgement on what the internet was.

There is a large block of (Internet) time missing from this analysis.