More specifically, they would use the default font, which IE in particular had set to Times New Roman, so that is what most people saw. To add insult to injury, there was no way to configure it for a very long time.
To this day I wonder if this particularly strange choice of a serif font that is very clearly intended primarily for printed documents rather than on-screen legibility is why this entire notion of using user-selected fonts for web pages has largely withered. What if they went with, say, Verdana instead?
Same, except my web backgrounds were in sepia. I had one of those old sepia monochrome monitors, so no grey for me. Or colors for that matter.
I even made my first website on that monitor (complete with animated gifs and <blink>, of course) - and seeing it finally on a color monitor was... interesting.
To this day I wonder if this particularly strange choice of a serif font that is very clearly intended primarily for printed documents rather than on-screen legibility is why this entire notion of using user-selected fonts for web pages has largely withered. What if they went with, say, Verdana instead?