Man. It's kind of crazy to think that I, a Finnish 13-year-old, was reading these ASCII tutorials written by someone in South Africa in those pre-WWW days.
The good content just somehow spread across the globe. People copied these files on floppy disks and uploaded them to BBS's on 2400 bps modems, and after a few months they had been around the world.
The inefficient and expensive distribution was actually a powerful filter for content quality. Today any stupid disinformational shit goes viral around the world in two minutes.