What Early WordPress Changed
Written retrospectively for the 2003 archive.
WordPress made its first public release in May 2003. Looking back from a site built with separate HTML files, the change worth noticing is where the work of publishing went. A new entry could be stored by the blogging software and shown through a template. The writer could spend less time editing the list of entries by hand.
Try comparing the two workflows on paper. For a hand-built site, list the files you would touch to add a post and link it from the homepage. Then sketch what a blog engine can do from one saved title and article. The title can appear on the article, in a list of recent posts, and in a feed without being copied into three files by the writer.