Summon? unless you had a warlock, no can do! Summoning stones didn't arrive until... hmm, I don't even know when. A few patches after this I think they were added as meeting stones, and then after that changed to summoning stones. Does that sound right?

Meeting stones were actually added fairly early on, in patch 1.3 (March 2005) but it took until 2.0.1 (Dec 2006) for them to actually function as a summon.

It's funny going through the patch changes for the meeting stones, as Blizzard desperately tried to get players to like using them. "Okay, here, you can join a meeting stone queue from any innkeeper. Okay, here we're relaxing the level requirements. Okay, now you can join one from anywhere. PLEASE SOMEONE USE THESE MEETING STONES."

Seriously, I remember when I would spam for ages to get a group together then we finally would get everyone there and someone would d/c or have to go. There was no LFD back in the day to be like no prob throw us back in the q. No! I had to port myself back to SW to be like...anyone else wanna run mara?

I remember seeing those old meeting stones. My friends and I (we were all new to the game) couldn't figure out the point of them. "So like, we have to click on this to enter this Deadmines place?"

Of course we also tried to 3 man deadmines because we didn't know the whole Instance design being aimed at Tank+Heals+3 DPS.

The advantage of taking and hour and a half to get a group together and assembled inside the instance was that everyone was then willing to invest a couple of hours in a dungeon.

Can you imagine how upset you would be using all that time to put together a group and then finishing the entire instance in 15 minutes?

I emphatically agree with Jack. You were also less likely to be a jerk since the power to be kicked lay only in the hands of one person, and if he kicked you that was at least an hour wasted... and that's before you even started the first pull. And people were also more likely to be patient with others in the dungeon since no one wanted to be That Guy who had to go back to Ironforge/Orgimmar to replace the greenhorn tank that your party leader decided to kick.

The time investment SUCKED hard. But it did have its benefits. A player was more solidly invested in the run and less likely to act out or quit.

I fondly remember my first DM run, which took at least 2-3 hours... I was with 3 guildies and a hunter we picked up outside, in Moonbrock... I didnt have much a clue about roles, and a lot of stuff went wrong (back then, using Arcane Explosion on the ramps on the ship would aggro everyone above you and that would cause a wipe...dunno if its still like that, but I wont find out because I learned there (and never forgot) that you dont do that), but it was SO much fun, trying to find out the tactics etc.
And even once we knew them, it still was fun, as we were talking and joking.