I worked for an eary/mid-90s mom-n-pop ISP started out of a spare closet of another business. Every customer was sent two 1.44 MB 3.5" floppies (which I also ha

I worked for an eary/mid-90s mom-n-pop ISP started out of a spare closet of another business. Every customer was sent two 1.44 MB 3.5" floppies (which I also had the pleasure of having to duplicate), with Netscape, Eudora, and Trumpet Winsock so they could dial-in. Having had Internet access through an academic organization before that (and pre-WWW), I fundamentally think that the Internet would not have taken off before web browsers -- even Gopher sites were too unfriendly. We were able to just barely get people to install one floppy after the other, copy a few files, and type in their username and password. The idea of working with the other CLI-based protocol driven ways of accessing information would have simply been impossible for 99% of our users. No OS at the time came with a dialer or browser out of the box, we had to supply them for every user. Netscape made the business possible.