How I Found Prototype
The reason I first stumbled on Prototype was because of digg. This is not the modern day digg that seems to enjoy lambasting Sarah Palin, but the prehistoric digg that was only tech news (the digg I miss that was slashdot++). I discovered it while digging (no pun intended) through their page source. I even "borrowed" one or two of their functions (Effect.FadeKeepSpace()) in my own digg clone that I wrote for TribalWar.
Prototype was great. It dealt with all of the cross-browser nonsense that made web development suck (mostly the fault of the engineers behind that abomination we call Internet Explorer). I still remember the day that I gave up using document.all for document.getElementById(). I relished in doing something the way it was supposed to be done.
The joy of typing $() over document.getElementById() still exists to this day. Short, sweet, and incredibly useful. I will admit that I did not really understand the power of $$() and css selectors until after my indoctrination to jquery but, it really does not matter in the grand scheme of things.
