If you wanted to submit a change to a page back in the day, you e-mailed someone a patch. That required "signing up" for an E-mail account (unless you were a weirdo who telnetted to an smtp port and hand-crafted a mail delivery) and using someone's e-mail service, after you used a local application to craft the patch.

The big difference today is that we don't use native apps, so we have to have accounts, to use somebody else's apps for free, because they want to track us and make money from us.

On the web today, we don't use apps, we generate revenue for others via their apps.