We had Geocities! We had IRC/ICQ/AIM/MSN Messenger! We had Newsgroups & Mailinglists! We had millions of PHPbb Forums for any thinkable niche, running on 50$

We had Geocities! We had IRC/ICQ/AIM/MSN Messenger! We had Newsgroups & Mailinglists! We had millions of PHPbb Forums for any thinkable niche, running on 50$/Month Shared Hosting! We had Websites lovingly created with Frontpage! We had Gameserver Browsers that ran as Desktop Software, without Ad placements! We had "underground filesharing" websites that took 700MB Games and split them in 300 parts and uploaded them to 20 different "free hosting" providers so you could be as much of a pirate as you wanted! We had Toplists of Websites (and Toplists) where communities and content providers fought over the highest rank which more often than not were completely arbitrarily awarded! We had Online Shopping where we could send a wire transfer before the items were sent! We had a world where the general public didn't want or need the Internet!