[beagle3]

An amazing amount was free and usable. Usenet was used for the stuff that is now broken among Facebook (non private use), Twitter, stackexchange, etc. free/libre software did exist, and though limited in scope, where it existed it was often better. Gcc wasn’t as good a compiler as some vendors, but was better than some in code generation, and better than all in standard compliance, error messages and general UI. emacs and vi were the better editors around.

NCSA Mosaic and Server (that started the web) were free. The web was free and a huge percentage of it informative / labor of love free from commercial interest.

There was a lot of free/gratis but not free/libre software as well.

But also, you had to pay for a lot more things than you do today. WYSIWYG Word processors and spell checkers, for example, were expensive, and there was no free alternative (TeX was, it was superior in quality but with abysmal UI)

I would gladly return the net, and possibly the software world, back to that state. A lot of people assume that without ads the net cannot exist - but it did, it was informative, and useful.