(Unfortunately, with social networks and chat systems and such opting out of federation and defaulting to closed ecosystems, I think we are moving toward independent corporate-sponsored networks, this time built on top of the global one.)
I wasn't there, but the internet presumably had value before the www, by having email, ftp and usenet.
It also demonstrates how futile nationalistic feelings are on computers. We invented the internet says the USA. We invented the www, says Europe. Both are irrelevant to the point they are almost wrong. The tech got valuable only because a planet worked together.
Don’t forget telnet and multi—player games. The Internet was a pretty cool place before ad networks conquered it.
It's far from one happy family.
As someone who was barely there, it was largely a standardized client problem. That's why NSCA Mosaic and later Netscape Navigator were so important.
The Internet provided transport... but for what?
To GP's standardization point, the Internet wouldn't have been successful if every server required you to have a different client to talk a different protocol. (The landscape was very different than that in which mobile apps now live)
Web protocols + a client browser that understood them = palatable UX
Not the same as the web, of course, and your grandmother wouldn't have been doing it.
there was content back then, but no curation. we would telnet from one machine to another using CLI.
the reward was a wall of ASCII highly formatted with extended fonts.
you could lurk in the login areas trying unix-fu or find a mud or a BBS.
there was always tin for reading usenet as a method of content search.
there wasnt so much content fiefdom, you could share links or post content with little oversight except numbers of attendance.
one night on a dumpster dive i found a minitel terminal [i thought it was "trash" but it was perfectly working.]
I was launched into a world of freenets and BBSs
Usenet died due to spam problems.
Ftp has been on the way out for a long long time.
Neither of these had anything to do with google.
Its ghost might still technically exist, but it is a pale ghost of what it was before.