Dialup was from what I know the only on ramp to what became the web.
Dialup and busy signals...
I remember a major virus issue in the early 1990’s. People hereabouts throwing out millions of likely contaminated floppy disks
I had at the time an Akai MIDI Sequencer...which stored data ...on floppies...so I collected as many well physically protected clean floppies as I could find,...formatted them...for my use and was Off And Running.
oh my what a time that was. a number of people wanted to know what I could possibly want those disks for...