it's jquery[0], so this is only the "old days" if 2006 was the "old days" for you (which obviously for many it was).
Before 2006 you'd probably use XMLHttpRequest directly- but of course that was only widely available in 2004 or 2005. Before that you would have used a hidden frame- or more likely you would use CGI to either replace a directive with the counter, or generate an image with the correct numbers. That's what I would call the "Old days": a dynamically generated gif with bold white-on-black numbers displaying the visit count.
> it's jquery[0], so this is only the "old days" if 2006 was the "old days" for you
People don't remember so well. Even backdating it that far is too generous. Just as a reference point, on New Year's Day 2006, jQuery didn't even exist yet. There was a time post-2010 when the scourge of jQuery showing up for trivial use cases was considered a real problem and a huge source of bloat on the web. (Side note: it's more than a little annoying, for this reason, to see people when trying to talk about changes in Web developer trends to lump jQuery and vanilla JS together.) To give another reference point, Firefox's then-new Tab Groups feature demanded the creation of a jQuery-like library for handling the tab canvas. John Resig was a longtime friend of the project and one-time Mozilla Corporation employee, but jQuery itself was out of the question because of bloat/performance. That was for Firefox 4, which would have been 2011, since it was released at the end of Q1 that year...
There's a lot more concentrated change in the 2010―2015 timeframe than is often accounted for when people think or talk about the Web.
Before 2006 you'd probably use XMLHttpRequest directly- but of course that was only widely available in 2004 or 2005. Before that you would have used a hidden frame- or more likely you would use CGI to either replace a directive with the counter, or generate an image with the correct numbers. That's what I would call the "Old days": a dynamically generated gif with bold white-on-black numbers displaying the visit count.
[0]: https://api.jquery.com/load/