The old web we pretty inconvenient. The early attempts at a search engine just spewed hostnames and file paths to be accessed using ftp. No standards for pictures. I was at Winter 1992 (January) UseNIX conference when we attempted to create a library of pictures of attendees. The digital pictures were saved in large text files. I literally purchased a Windows machine with a good greyscale video card and wrote the graphics routine myself to decode the picture files into a viewable image. A bit odd on my amber phosphor screen, but very viewable. A few more years would elapse before Nathaniel Borenstein invented MIME to allow transport of binary artifacts with multipart documents. The sound files and picture file formats followed. We stood up our first X11 based Mosaic browsers around June 1993.
“It was at Winter 1992 (January) UseNIX conference when we attempted to create a library of pictures of attendees”
We are not worthy. Proud to know you. I fiddled with Unix for a couple of years when running my conspiracy BBS “Baby Brain” via Mustang, a BBS app, off a 1200 baud modem in Oakland in the early 90’s. One of my BBS visitors got in touch and baked me cookies. She’s still an email friend 25 years later.