14 years in the blink of an eye and the clack of the keyboard. Congrats!
In 1997 it was browsed on boxen that ate 300 watts, ran a blazing 133MHz Pentium running Windows 95, and a dial up. Formatting was wild-West and anyone could screw up a thread with naughty or erroneous HTML. Posting large graphics was a definite no no.
Now it’s on little power sipping laptops running insane numbers of gigahertz, with Windows 7 or maybe Ubuntu or another flavor of Linux, broadband Internet (full videos are nuthin’) and threads are bullet proof. Servers aren’t always bullet proof, however....