A theme I saw yesterday & unwittingly contributed to: Old protocols are perfectly satisfactory. The issue is that as technology is brought to the masses it gets filtered through the lens of capitalism!
Personally I quite like:
HTTP
HTML (caveats)
CSS (caveats)
RSS
XMPP
eMail
I tend to be quite cynical about what gets sold as innovations, but I won't say there ever was a golden era of computing we've fallen from grace from.
