Sort of this: https://youtube.com/shorts/HHpwvXNtpBo

But also it was kind of depressive, because you would think "I wonder how X works" and that was that, you never learned petty stuff because doing so was too much hassle for a simple curiosity.

Before wiki you could still find answers on Google or Yahoo, but there was no source of truth and you could find any answer you wanted if you looked for it, so it was taken with a grain of salt. Before that, yes, encyclopedias or asking someone who knew about it, but then you could get wrong answers and not know about it.

Back then we used to think that people seemed stupid because they didn't have access to information, so if they had learned something wrong there was no way of convincing them otherwise.