Altavista was early. If you were on in 1996, that was only 5 years after the “birth” of the web. Before spiders, things were organized like Gopher. There wer

Altavista was early. If you were on in 1996, that was only 5 years after the “birth” of the web. Before spiders, things were organized like Gopher. There were directories you could look up. Some pages kept archives of links. Web crawlers were introduced in 1993. At that point, gopher probably had more content. Remember WAIS? All the libraries liked that protocol. Encarta was still selling like hot cakes.