First Website (1992)

"I'm also curious because I remember that the first time I used the Internet (not internet, as it is nowadays), I had to buy a paper book with categorized links to websites."

I was looking at one of these books the other day called "The Internet Yellow Pages"

In the early 90s McGraw Hill published a book with this title

I found a version published by Que (Pearson Education) from 2007 (I suspect there may even be later editions)

That's 14 years into the public www

This was right before the iPhone

I never used these books. The best resources I remember were lists of sites published via FTP

Some of the nostalgia is still easily accessible via textfiles.com

I still use the internet in much the same way I did when I was first connected through a university. UNIX-like OS, no graphics, 100% command line

The main difference between then and now for me is the hardware and bandwidth

Everything is so much faster

IME, generally any slowness today is due (directly or indirectly) to the commercialisation ("monetisation") of _traffic_, e.g., ads, tracking, or having to use Tor to avoid all the nonsense

Originally the idea of commercial use of the internet was to sell products and services (excluding "advertising services"), not to sell and "monetise" _traffic_

Internet subscriber bandwidth is now used by companies for free to perform data collection, surveillance, telemetry, mostly undetected by the subscriber

For example, the majority of "Big Tech" revenues do not come from selling products and (non-advertising) services but from performing data collection, surveillance and "ad services". Even popular subscription software that predated the web, e.g., MS Windows, is engaged in data collection, surveillance and ads/tracking as a "business". Apple, once a traditional hardware company, is engaged in this activity as well

1. I have been doing some information retrieval experiments and the speed can be mind-blowing

"universal access to a large universe of documents"

It's a sad fact that a large part of the web doesn't work without Javascript, a technology which enables privacy-invasive practices (and surveillance capitalism). It wasn't as bad when progressive enhancement was the norm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

Don't be daft. gopher and wais are just protocols and via telnet you got a menuing system in what we call a TUI nowadays.

I'm not sure which part of the chicken you are trying to push the eggs back into but please don't.