Pre-Mosaic Era
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was ascii encoded, typically displayed in monochrome courier on a black screen.Those were the days when the Net was only of academic interest. Each year in september the Net was flooded by a new load of students, who were making themselves familiar with USENET, and email (using elm and other UNIX software). If anybody used the word site, you could be sure they meant an FTP site. That is, a file archive.