After reading this, I realized that I'm totally guilty of calling a simple HTML page or a page that doesn't look modern
as retro. In reality, it's only primitive in its state. Since the end user is no longer the designer, that's why so much research is now put into developing a product. There's less room for customization, unless that is built in. Because the language was so limited back then, it forced designers to utilize what was available to communicate what the users were interacting with. An example being links that turned purple because it's been visited. That suddenly became the universal language.