I grew up with the coolest pre-internet hobby (was a ham radio operator) but happy to comment on this as I got into the internet at the very beginning.

Worth mentioning that pre-internet, there was still quite an online thing going on. They were dial-in bulletin boards, called Bulletin Board System (BBS) that literally used text characters for the graphics. When I was 12, I got a 900-baud modem for Christmas and I was the SHIT. I'm telling you. I mowed lawns to get a dedicated phone line for my modem and holy hell, my pre-internet internet was in full swing. The problem -- as us old timers might recall -- is that there were limited phone lines at the host site, so getting a busy signal on the popular BBSs was really common.

The funny thing is the way these loaded on the screen. Think of the graphics in a high-tech control room scene of something like The Terminator, whereby the screen appears by way of a series of rows of characters from top left to lower right, line by line. The chat rooms were total shit-shows and I felt they were kind of amateurish and ridiculous, but also addictive for the reason that an anonymous "username" could be chosen.

I think the top-voted comment is more or less spot on. It was intuitive to learn and was a generally slow process. AOL was king. The pre-Google engines were Excite (my go-to) and Yahoo (which I never used and still don't. Looking back on it all, I remember thinking "holy shit" when Flash came out, as well as .pdf and eventually high-speed internet being offered by the phone and cable companies. When I was a freshman in college in 1996, I don't recall any of my classes using a website, but by 1997, almost all of my professors used the web.