URLs were invented by Tim Berners-Lee. They do not precede the web. There were separate namespaces before the web; there was Gopher and FTP, and various shorthands to indicate the combination of a site and a path, but no standard, universal resource locator (see what I did there?).
That's indeed what I thought.
A lot of people call domain names URLs, which is where I thought the OP was going.
Sorry for the lack of clarity - I was thinking of Gopher.