Just random webpages that you took at face value because there’s no way someone can publish misinformation on something as big and sophisticated as this internet thing.

I grew up in the 90s, so we had Encarta for most of the time I needed an encyclopedia.

It also wasn’t uncommon to have a (partial) set of encyclopedias at home. You could buy them, one or more volumes at a time, over the phone or occasionally from door-to-door salespeople. We also had an old set from the 60s that we inherited from my grandmother.

You could argue about who was right about some obscure fact all night long, or come up with your own creative theories.
Nowadays, in less than a minute, someone will look it up, killing the conversation.

You parents would just tell you something and you assumed it was true until you learned years later they where just winging it with bullshit.

Let me tell you about borrow return policy at libraries and the associated fines for late returns and how to find something using the dewey decimal classification system. Fun times!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-library-book-fine-paid

I had a Microsoft Encarta on a cd that I used for projects when I was young, Wikipedia launched midway through my grade 5 and by grade 6 I was using it for research (despite the “you can’t trust Wikipedia, anyone can edit it!” that was still a thing into grade 12 from my teachers) for any school project. My parents also had a copy of the Oxford’s Canadian English dictionary that was an absolute time, used that a heck of a lot too.

I use Wikipedia as a jumping off point, good to get information, get the details from citations. I wasn’t old enough to do complex work pretty wikipedia, but I’d imagine it’d be the same thing, encyclopaedia to lookup a topic, dive into reference materials for details from there.

I’ll be honest man: it sucked.

Imagine a time where you had a question, and you just… didn’t get to know the answer. Like, literally every time you just had to hope someone in your general area had some level of confidence in their answer to satisfy your curiosity until you could confirm it later. Or you’d just go around repeating it to people with out confirming. Whatever.

If something was important enough, you’d go track down an answer. Remember to look it up when you got home using your parent’s encyclopedias. Or make a trip to the library.

In a way, we kind of lost something: conversation and discussion. Before I feel like people really picked apart an issue where you’d all come up with a consensus over a few hours of discussion about a topic at a party or something. Then someone would come back with the answer another day, and bring in some more stuff they learned while looking it up, and it would start a whole new conversation.

Mostly you either went without knowing stuff, or you had to go to the library. I knew a couple of wealthy folks who had their own sets of encyclopedia at home which could cost thousands of dollars.

Back in the days before the interwebs and pocket computers with access to all the knowledge and history of mankind, there were the outdated encyclopedia at home that you’d pop out occasionally, the up to date encyclopedia at the library that you never got around to check out anything casual and then there was the truth by the person arguing the most insistent that they were right.

I remember a time when people got into arguments over who played a roll in a movie. one time we drove to a video rental store to settle it.

People used to call the Reference Desk at their local public library to ask a question and get an answer.

Instead of a webpage, you had a whole shelf of books laid out in more or less the same fashion as Wikipedia.

Fun fact: I learned about the Internet from the encyclopedia and begged my parents to get online. I used to just read those things like regular books. I only learned recently that when I first went online in 1993, the World Wide Web was literally only months old.

Everybody’s like “Encarta” but before CD-ROMs etc, we had massive ass sets of encyclopedias. You’d actually have an encyclopedia subscription so they could send you errata for stuff that changed over time. Sort of like paper DLC for reality.

It sucked.

But pre-Internet it was fun to sit around and flip through the encyclopedias/dictionaries and read stuff. If you were lucky you’d find something sex-related.

Encarta and Comptons