"the internet" used to be much more diverse in terms of protocols / tech used. Gopher / Veronica, Archie, USENET, IRC, etc. Lots more text. Oh, and you used

"the internet" used to be much more diverse in terms of protocols / tech used. Gopher / Veronica, Archie, USENET, IRC, etc. Lots more text. Oh, and you used telnet to get to these things, not ssh. SSH didn't become de rigeur until the very late 90s. This is not to say that the web didn't exist at the time; it did. Webcrawler was useful back in the days of Webrings.