Back in the early days,Adult film School season 3 episode 2 - Chloe and Jason the internet was a very different creature from what it is today. To most, it would be unrecognizable, consisting primarily of bulletin board systems with no multimedia, aside from a few low-res inline images. These systems were disparate and had to be dialed into individually.
The internet changed dramatically with the advent of the World Wide Web. All of those previously separate systems were connected, but the world needed a way to "browse" them – a "web browser" was in order.