It was around 1990 that I first started using Gopher space. It was all text-only but it was great fun just wandering around looking at all sort of information. I remember using Veronica to search for things and using FTP to download files. To get images, you just see the titles of the pictures, so to view them you had to download them first and then open them using a graphics program. It was a slow process, but really exciting back then. And we had e-mail but they were all simple text and the size was limited to something like 1K. No file attachments.
So if you wanted to e-mail to somebody a picture, like a bitmap, you had to UUENCODE the file to turn it into text. Then we had to split up the text into multiple pieces each less than 1K. Then you would e-mail multiple Messages. The person who receives the Messages saves the text, deletes the header lines from each, concatenates them together in order, and UUDECODES it to get the image file back. Ahh, those were the good old days...
Shortly after that, I was introduced to NTSC Mosaic, Version 1... the graphical browser. It had the cool spinning globe logo with the arrows. It was very slow. It was wonderful. The memories...