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Certainly there must have been a short period of time where a few URLs existed on the web but no browser to access them. Is there a built in function within an operating system to search online without a browser? Or were browsers created before the internet/web?
Just wondering how it worked in the very early days.
If you mean the internet before the WWW, there were no search engines.
I started using the internet about 1994/95. I was on dialup at 9600 at the time. It was slow but the web pages were no where as complex as they are nowadays. There's always been some type of searches available. I do remember saving a
lot of bookmarks.
In the early days there were the BBS's, where we dialed in individual phone numbers and then downloaded or (rarely because of the cost) had chats.
What a lot of folks don't recognize is that Compuserve, AOL, and the other one whose name escapes me had organization that allowed many of the purposes of the web to be realized before the web was built. We had news, downloads, various forums, messenging, stock quotes and charts, email, etc.
The broader "net" was a wild west because of the lack of supervision and redaction of objectionable content. Compuserve used Spry Mosaic as an access point to the internet. Mosaic allowed access to AltaVista.
The user migration from the various services to the web was surprisingly easy, with the equivalent of walking outside a neighborhood to explore a larger downtown.
In some ways, the early days of the net had more information. People and companies uploaded databases without regard to privacy or copyright or the idea of monetization. Because text was predominant and images optimized for fast loading, service could be reasonably fast even on dial-up.
Yeah, well, I remember waiting for a page to load for minutes (seemed like hours) just to find out it was loading a midi version of "Smoke on the Water"
The short answer to your question was they used Archie for several years, which would be more like what you mean by a search engine.
A longer answer The Who is user search dates back to 1982 and the Knowbot Information Service multi-network user search was first implemented in 1989. The first well documented search engine that searched content files, namely FTP files was Archie, which debuted on 10 September 1990.
The first commercial Internet domain name, in the TLD com, was registered on 15 March 1985 in the name symbolics.com by Symbolics Inc., a computer systems firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.By 1992, fewer than 15,000 com domains had been registered.
The first web browser, called WorldWideWeb, was invented in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He then recruited Nicola Pellow to write the Line Mode Browser, which displayed web pages on dumb terminals; it was released in 1991. Nicola Pellow and Tim Berners-Lee in their office at CERN.
Marc Andreessen, lead developer of Mosaic and Navigator 1993 was a landmark year with the release of Mosaic, credited as "the world's first popular browser"
In the early days there were the BBS's, where we dialed in individual phone numbers and then downloaded or (rarely because of the cost) had chats.
What a lot of folks don't recognize is that Compuserve, AOL, and the other one whose name escapes me had organization that allowed many of the purposes of the web to be realized before the web was built. We had news, downloads, various forums, messenging, stock quotes and charts, email, etc.
The broader "net" was a wild west because of the lack of supervision and redaction of objectionable content. Compuserve used Spry Mosaic as an access point to the internet. Mosaic allowed access to AltaVista.
The user migration from the various services to the web was surprisingly easy, with the equivalent of walking outside a neighborhood to explore a larger downtown.
In some ways, the early days of the net had more information. People and companies uploaded databases without regard to privacy or copyright or the idea of monetization. Because text was predominant and images optimized for fast loading, service could be reasonably fast even on dial-up.
I had internet in mid 1980s and I recall dialing into each website individually using dos. Seems weird now.
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