Not trying to be "that douchey old times" guy but back in 2005 you could access many APIs for things like weather, temperature, ongoing projects, lists of conference locations, lists of RSS subscriptions, insect population predictions, all sorts.

Today they still exist, but with the exception of the most basic and dated corporate free APIs (e.g. reddit) they are gated by API keys and often access limits.

It was truly rare to see access limits in 2005; APIs were slow and unreliable but not limited.

If anyone documented the loss of APIs (particularly in 2008 IIRC?) I would to read more about it myself too. I think Tom Scott did a video on this, but I can't find it.