I think a lot of it was how "magical" it all was. All of it was so new. Same with all these websites being mentioned. I don't want to go back to the technologies we had then, but it was all paradigm changing then.

My mom would threaten to hide my keyboard. I was lucky that we got a DSL line really early (we lived in Silicon Valley and my dad was a software engineer) so taking my keyboard was the only way she knew I would be up still.