They weren’t. The web was text based. If you wanted images you went to an alt.binaries.pictures newsgroup in your newsgroup app and uudecoded the attachments.
People fucking HATED Marc Andreesen for making the world wide web like magazines.
People fucking HATED Marc Andreesen for making the world wide web like magazines.
Why images are considered bad? Their absence seems really hurts expressiveness of at least some articles.
This was back in the days when people were using their terminal program in Windows to Telnet into the UNIX server at school / work to browse the web ( in text ) after all.
People using the World Wide Web were probably using things like Veronica and Gopher just as much.
Also, if you are connecting over a modem, images would slow things down.
I do not remember too much resistance though. Mosaic was a revolution ( literally ).
I dunno how slow things were in '93, but slower for sure.
A 2MB image, and remember that JPEG and PNG weren't common yet either, would take you 10 minutes to download on 33.6 kbps.
That's 2000000 bytes, 10bits per byte (start bit + 8 bits of data + stop bit), 33kbits/sec
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That's 10 minutes of waiting for the download, doing nothing else.
Price Club (now Costco) was pushing some internet service that wasn't AOL, but was a lot cheaper.
My first Internet connection was over a 9600 baud SLIP connection.