Comment by cestith
17 hours ago
You’re right to a point. The Internet is much older than the Web. Content on the Internet was largely FTP sites, Gopher sites, and Usenet long before the Web existed. We also had MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, talkers, chat rooms, BBSes, and more over Telnet well before the web was widespread.
Telnet 1969, standardized 1983
FTP 1971
UUCP 1979
SMTP 1981
RSH 1983
TCP/IP v4 1984
NNTP 1986 (the successor to UUCP for newsgroups)
IRC 1988
Archie 1990 (search engine for ftp sites)
Gopher 1991
WWW 1989 first published 1991
Veronica 1992 (search engine for Gopher sites)
SSH 1995
And in parallel we had FIDONet. Mustn't forget that magical place and source of many a late night and large phone bill.
Many BBSes in the later dial-up BBS days had gateways between the BBS itself or Fidonet echoes and parts of the Internet, too. Some of them had Internet email for their BBS users. Some kept a copy of parts of Usenet, or had a reader on the board that was a gateway to a full feed somewhere. Some would mirror popular FTP sites to the board’s downloads section. It was a magical time.