Spoiler your message if you want to.
This isn’t really trivia for anyone who played back then,
But you used to be able to play Minecraft for free back on the official website with no download required. Even online servers. It wasn’t an updated version of the game (Minecraft classic), but if you paid for the game it would be and still not be download required to play
I guess the trivia for me is I had no idea they brought it back, at least for classic, not the full game (which is not possible to do anymore apparently). I just tried it out and it seems very similar if not the same, except the multiplayer seems to work different.
I remember playing scripted capture the flag games on public Minecraft classic servers with the server browser listed directly on Minecraft.net
I don’t see anything like that remaining, but it looks like it lets you invite people directly to your world instead
This is what the server browser used to look like: https://web.archive.org/web/20120210141815/http://www.minecraft.net/classic/list
you can do that unofficially with eaglercraft.com these days, I think its running minecraft 1.8 in a browser?