You had the internet? How many websites did you visit? How much news did you get from it?
AOL started internet service for DOS computers in 1991. What internet service did you have in 1990?
Internet Explorer started in 1995. What browser did you use in 1990?
Fox News started in 1996. CNN was the only 24 hour news channel at the time. So how many stories of bird deaths in Sweden do you think they would show in a day?
News is everywhere today. Compared to today, we were living in the Stone Age in 1990.
Well...many people were emailing in the 1980s, so there was net communication certainly by that time. When was the term, “Internet,” coined? I don’t know. I think I used CompuServe as my provider. I didn’t receive a lot of news via that, but it was possible.
Although FOX news is generally more informative and less biased, IMO, than the rest, there were TV and radio stations before the 1990s. We’ve been involved in world wars and all kinds of international activity for quite a long time - so people have kept up with current events. Massive bird killings? Maybe they wouldn’t have received so much attention, but, on the other hand, maybe they would have.
I’ve beed connected to the internet since 1985. I
used Phil Karn Net/NOS TCP/IP for DOS and a
1200 baud modem to a port at UCSD. By 1986, I
had real connectivity at PacBell. It was simple mail,
netnews, ftp and a few simple search engines via
telnet. Good enough to do my job and cooperatively
network over 100 machines with TCP/IP between
Hayward and San Diego. The “browser” didn’t
arrive on the scene until 1993.
“What internet service did you have in 1990?”
Arpanet and usenet, and I was signed up for three bbs services for news and fractal graphics. Usenet started in 1979 and was pretty widely used by 1980. BBS systems were running by ‘76 or ‘78 or so and most were specialized (BBS has been discussed as an alternate to WWW should the governments crack down on Web discussion).
These were all text-based dialup services with modems (remember modems? lol)unless you were at a place tied to Arpanet trunks. Later in the ‘80s you could telnet in.
You are correct that the graphics-heavy WWW was not there, nor were specific “browsers” but you could telnet in or dial in to a server.
Way back then, people could coordinate meteor shower falls or bolide falls using usenet, and could aggregate news stories from many sources, especially if many people were interested in a given topic and would feed info to the nets. It was a lot like Free Republic, groups of people with a common interest could form a group and share data pretty much globally if you could get something like a TTY43 terminal.
While I used Arpanet mostly for data transfers and geeky stuff, there was quite a lot of “news” and discussion.
So if people noticed fish kills and bird falls and posted the news, you could gain a perspective over a wide geo area and time span.
I had a coal-fired computer, the steam pipes got really hot. I programmed in Onetran.
There are many of us who used the Internet back in the 1970s and 1980s. The WWW is relatively new. I actively used Compuserve daily from the late 1970s (on a 300 baud modem). In the 1980s I was using Prodigy (one of their beta users when it first appeared). I don't doubt that many Freepers were ahead of the public at large in being online.