I would imagine it was harder to get information on topics as you would’ve had to buy/borrow encyclopedias to do.
Were there proprietary predecessor websites?
Tell me about the dark ages!
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Well, you see, we’d learn everything from my best friends older brother that smoked too much weed and was unemployed.
If he was wrong, then you simply didn’t know he was wrong and you’d go around spouting off nonsense, cause yeah huh I heard it from Jake’s brother
In the long-long-ago, encyclopaedias were on paper, 28 volumes, and weighed 14kg. Quite comprehensive.
Then encyclopaedias were on a CD or two, around 100g.
Before Wikipedia, everything2 was a previous example of a massively-interlinked-website. You could search and maybe turn up some details.
Or prior to google being created, you would just do a search in metacrawler.com to usually turn up some OK answers.
One word: Encarta.
This.
“Don’t just copy and paste from Encarta” was commonly recited by my teachers when I was younger
All information was passed down orally by people specially-trained to serve as “oral repositories”—in various cultures they were called bards, makars, aoidos, and various other terms. Important information was often set in verse to aid memorization.
There was a transitional period when writing and printing were used, and an even briefer period when these were supplemented by encyclopedias on CD-ROM before the birth of Wikipedia.
