And for the longest time, nobody even considered javascript to be a serious tool; It was rare for anyone to write more than a hundred lines of javascript.

I remember when google introduced gmail in 2004. Suddenly google had done full single-page application in javascript, proving that not only was it possible, but that the resulting user-experience was awesome.

At the time, there were no javascript frameworks. Jquery (if you can even call it a framework) wasn't created until 2006. I don't think there were even helper libraries.

I mostly remember javascript from dynamicdrive.com, where you would go to find quick snippets of "Dynamic HTML" to copy/paste into your html. Sometimes there were useful things like roll-over menus, but I remember many of them being silly toys, like sparkles that would follow your mouse around the screen, or snow which would slowly cover the page.