Before HTML and the web, there was still the internet (formerly Arpanet). It could be browsed through text menus using the "gopher" protocol which could return menus of additional links or text documents. But documents couldn't have embedded hyperlinks or images in them -- they were strictly text documents. Tim Berners-Lee applied a structured document model (HTML) with embedded links to other documents, creating the "web" as we know it, not the internet.