We used telnet. There were no graphics per se. Before www the "interactive" internet was gopher and wais and co.

Navigation was moving a cursor around to highlight points of interest, some of which would be links to further stuff or controls to do something like go back or forwards.

Install lynx or links2 (ie text mode browsers) and you'll get the idea.

The vaguely graphic efforts with browsable content that you might recognise before www were the likes of Compuserve. That got you a sort of forum style interface.

It's quite hard to explain just how fast things have moved over the last 40 odd years (I'm 1970 to date - 55). I should also point out that my granddad saw rather a lot of change from 1901 to 1989. To be honest the last 15 odd years are even madder than the previous 25 and that's just my own personal recollection.

That's rather sad, its just a museum exhibit about the www, so prohibition might look like a pathetic attempt at revisionism.

What is DU?

It just blew my mind! I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at all, JS was written for manipulating the DOM but I was NOT expecting a cool terminal style with a typing/Matrix-style transition animation from some of the first webpages ever.

My brain even ascribed a CRT distortion effect to it, even though that's not actually happening.

edit: okay, no, I am an idiot. Those pages were made in 2013:

https://line-mode.cern.ch/

I found it via gopher and wais - I can't remember which one did what, it was a fair few years ago.

I telnetted from my PC to a VAX, then to a X.25 PAD, then onto a Janet system, then to somewhere in the US and then to CERN. Eventually I'd get a menu with a link to the www. I'd then navigate the www with different keystrokes.

www was/is free form links to stuff instead of hierarchical menus. It was an evolution not a revolution and there is no need to invoke "chicken or egg".

Was your script the very first web crawler or did you just have a list?

Wow. Which year was it?

This site has a way to experience as it once was. I’m on mobile now, but from what I remember when I tried it, each link opened up a new document window. So the idea of going back wasn’t relevant. You’d simply close the window.

https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/

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.

Connecting... Waiting... It was slow, both because of dial-up kbit/s and ping to websites, and every page felt like you were literally sending a request to another part of the planet. It felt like that was actually happening, and it was very different from what we experience now.

But most importantly, there were zero funds/VC in that Internet. Only very niche websites, zero online services, even email was difficult to obtain and felt like a real privilege. Only the fact of being connected made everyone feel not a stranger.

I kind of miss that Internet, but I'm grateful that once I was part of it.

In 1993, you could refresh the home page of Netscape (Mosaic) every day and it would mention new sites that had been added. That became unmanageable quickly, which is when two dudes from Stanford started a directory.

Yeah, I just wrote an edit to my comment actually after I noticed that. It in fact has an explicit Back command you can run; one of the few commands it supports.