You could use the web before that, but with text based browsers which frankly weren't very inspiring nor popular. Most people preferred gopher etc - there was a

You could use the web before that, but with text based browsers which frankly weren't very inspiring nor popular. Most people preferred gopher etc - there was a brilliant mac gopher client. What transformed the web was the launch of the Mosaic along with NCSA HTTPd - mostly in the backend of 1993 - it took off like wild fire - it's hard to remember dates, but I definitely remember the launch of Netscape Browser - which according to wikipedia was late 1994 - and at that point the web was already pretty popular. Not just the web, but a large percentage of people had their own websites - it was ridiculously easy to do - just put an index.html in your ~/public_html folder. Obviously this was all the in rarefied atmosphere of academia - and the computers were Unix work stations and most users were at University and largely PhD students at that.