On: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and N...

[komali2]

The article indicates that the "free" stuff on the internet was hidden away in weird places - ftp servers and the like. No google to find it for you, the only way was by word of mouth, or I guess via published book.

Answers a question I always had about "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. The main character, Hiro Protagonist (I still giggle at that name), sometimes did work as a kind of data wrangler - "gathering intel and selling it to the CIC, the for-profit organization that evolved from the CIA's merger with the Library of Congress" (Wikipedia).

I always wondered what made that feasible as a sort of profit model, and I guess now I know - that was the state of the internet in 1992, when the book was published. Seems like a way cooler time period for Cyberpunk stuff, I'm almost sad I missed it :(

[epc → komali2]

We did have search engines, just not as fast or encompassing as Google. Archie came online in 1990 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_search_engine ). Jughead and Veronica followed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jughead_(search_engine) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine) ). More often than not a search started with a Usenet newsgroup FAQ.

[cestith → epc]

Don't forget we had Gopher and WAIS before the Web, too.

[_wiv7 → komali2]

Of course, still, finding the good stuff, rather than whatever has been SEO'd in the google listings is difficult in some subjects.