Before the spread of the World Wide Web, the closest analogue in cultural terms was the collection of Computer Bulletin Board Systems or BBS services. Individual computers would connect directly to other computers via phone line in order to exchange information. These systems were limited by the technology of their era; client and service computers often had limited space, dial up modems had bandwidth so low as to be laughable by modern standards, and portable storage was limited primarily to magnetic floppy disks that could not even hold 2 MB of data. There were also issues of competing file formats and a lack of standardization, with ASCII being the lowest-common-denominator choice. Images were usually limited to ASCII art representations, as a lot of the file compression algorithms that turned large bitmap files into more nimble JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs were just a gleam in some programmers eye.
This meant that, leaving aside variations in style and formatting, these files had to condense a considerable amount of information into a very small package, both in computer terms and human terms; it might take a while to download a particularly large file from a bulletin board, which might not prove to be useful or informative or entertaining compared to multiple smaller files that could be accessed in the same time frame. In a way it presaged the push towards small-form video content in the present day, but motivated purely by cost-benefit analysis on the part of writers, readers, and hosts rather than advertising engagement; it was naturally organic, not algorithmically enforced. To a lesser extent this also impacted the specific content of the files; according to the Wadsworth Constant, the first 30% of every YouTube video can be skipped while not losing any information content, something only possible because our computing and telecommunications technology has undergone multiple revolutions in the past three decades, while our precursors didn't have the luxury of "filler" content.
While I personally believe we have gained more than we have lost through the adoption of the World Wide Web and its various protocols, and indeed I cannot see the BBS era through rose-colored glasses because I did not experience it personally, only read about it after the fact through historical and personal accounts, the topic of condensing the maximum information into the smallest possible footprint is definitely on my mind a lot these days.
