[coldtea]

>Another casualty of the internet. Before the web, you would pretty much only learn about whatever martial arts were available in your area. There was no objective truth.

Yeah, thank god for the internet for giving us that.

>In the absence of evidence, comparisons between martial arts were done on a subjective level: does it look cool?

I'm not sure where you lived, but I lived in a peripheral western country in Europe, and even 10 years before the "internet" (www), we had tons of various martial arts schools available, from Kung-Fu to Tae-Kwon-Do to Thai Kick Boxing, Capoeira, Krav Maga, Tai Chi and several more varieties I don't even care about.

Infact, if anything, the golden age of such practices was mostly in the 70s and 80s (with Bruce Lee, Karate Kid, and the pulp action/karate movies).