> For the people who got introduced to the web before me, how was "web browsing" done in the earlier decade of the Web? I'm assuming Google is not the first search engine available, but I'm pretty sure search engines were not the only way to go around.
Yahoo! used to have humans looking at websites and adding them to an index. Yes, someone would send in a link to a porn website, and someone on the porn indexing team would view the site and add it to an index.
Curation efforts like this were important. People built web-rings for similar content; Usenet FAQs listed useful sites.
But people didn't just use WWW. They used Usenet, sometimes Gopher or telnet, ftp, and email. Or they were part of some other online community that had a www gateway. The prices now seem eye-watering.
And this is at a time when people had slow modems and usually paid for the telephone calls too. Thus, offline readers (things like BlueWave for email and fidonet) were popular.
Your last paragraph: I'd have a look through the newsgroup lists for relevant groups. I'd subscribe, fetch headers, look for a faq, retrieve the faq, and read that. I'd lurk the group for a bit, and try to do my own work. Then, after I'd learnt the group for a bit and participated in other stuff I'd try to ask a good question, with links to how far I'd got and an attempt at a correct reply.
Yahoo! was pretty good once you got the hang of rules. HotBot, dogpile, altavista (and astalavista) were also handy. But Google really was revolutionarily good.
I remember around the time CompuServe bought The Source, CIS was charging based on the speed of your connection (I think $12.80/hr was for a 9600 baud connection). There were several products to minimize your online time that would script connections - go to your favorite forums, download new messages, post anything you had pending, and hang up.
When AOL came on the scene, they eventually overtook the old walled-garden players by tactics like providing access to Usenet and the web (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September was an unfortunate fallout from that), and provided a much cheaper pricing model. CIS tried to catch up by buying the Spry company, using its browser (basically a branded NCSA Mosaic), releasing scripts for Trumpet Winsock to get to the net from a CompuServe x.25 trunk, and added the option to use that same net connection to telnet back into CompuServe.
It was confusing, caused too much network traffic, and CompuServe mismanaged it all, and ultimately collapsed, to be bought out by AOL... who eventually lost relevance outside of the chat universe.
Seconding the emphasis on "Internet != Web" being more true for the 90's user. It wasn't until 1998 or so that the family computer transitioned from an dial-up shell account with 5mb disk quota (crl.com, which no longer exists) to SLIP/PPP with NetZero. The Web experience via shell account was Lynx-only, and Usenet was still a major source of information, albeit it was riddled with trolling and spam by then.
Yahoo! used to have humans looking at websites and adding them to an index. Yes, someone would send in a link to a porn website, and someone on the porn indexing team would view the site and add it to an index.
Curation efforts like this were important. People built web-rings for similar content; Usenet FAQs listed useful sites.
But people didn't just use WWW. They used Usenet, sometimes Gopher or telnet, ftp, and email. Or they were part of some other online community that had a www gateway. The prices now seem eye-watering.
The electronic landscape in 1988 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3087928)
(http://i53.tinypic.com/2janfrd.jpg)
Compuserve - $11 per hour.
The Source - $8 per hour
Delphi - $6 per hour
BIX $9 per hour
And this is at a time when people had slow modems and usually paid for the telephone calls too. Thus, offline readers (things like BlueWave for email and fidonet) were popular.
Your last paragraph: I'd have a look through the newsgroup lists for relevant groups. I'd subscribe, fetch headers, look for a faq, retrieve the faq, and read that. I'd lurk the group for a bit, and try to do my own work. Then, after I'd learnt the group for a bit and participated in other stuff I'd try to ask a good question, with links to how far I'd got and an attempt at a correct reply.
Yahoo! was pretty good once you got the hang of rules. HotBot, dogpile, altavista (and astalavista) were also handy. But Google really was revolutionarily good.