I've heard people compare the internet to the printing press. For STEM people, lawyers, journalists, academics, and similar [1] I think that is fairly accurate. The major impact of the internet on our work and entertainment was that it made a bunch of things a lot easier and cheaper. We had ways of doing those things pre-internet but they took more time and effort.

For instance, in college in the early '80s for a number theory class I was taking at Caltech where we had to each do a presentation on some interesting topic, I wanted to do one on the Adleman–Pomerance–Rumely primality test, which had just recently been announced. So I wrote a letter to Adleman asking for a copy of the paper and explained why I wanted it. He sent a copy of the paper (or more likely told his secretary to send a copy). Turnaround time was something like a week or so.

Nowadays, they'd have a preliminary version of a paper up on Arxiv.org, or on their web pages at their universities.

Another example is lawyers. Here's a comment from a while back where I described how lawyers conducted legal research circa 1960 [2].

Nowadays, all that stuff is in online databases accessible via the internet.

Note that in both of the above examples the internet did not really enable us to accomplish tasks that we could not accomplish, but it let us do those tasks much more quickly and efficiently.

This is similar to what the printing press did--books could be copied before the printing press but it took a lot of manual labor, so there were few copies of any given book. After the printing press, books could be copies much more easily, quickly, and cheaply, and so copies could be made and distributed to many libraries.

For people who don't depend as much on information for their work, the internet brought things like personal email, photo sharing, online shopping, and expanded entertainment options. Again, people had ways to do these things but they were not as efficient. We wrote letters and mailed them. We invited people over with the promise of food and drink and then ambushed them with our slide projectors. We had mail order catalogs.

There is a third group of people for whom the internet had a much more profound effect. These are the people with fringe beliefs, or beliefs that are not social acceptable to most people in their area, or with extreme political positions. People like those who think vaccinations are really drugs to make us more compliant, or that building bike paths is part of a plan to force us into denser cities so the UN can more easily take control [3].

Before the internet, these kind of people were somewhat isolated. There would typically be a small number at most in any area, and they lacked critical mass to do any more than just make a bit of noise. Sometimes they would discover other like minded people in organizations like the John Birch Society, and organize a bit beyond locally via mail.

For these people the internet was much more transformative than the printing press. It was like the discovery of fire.

They could now easily find each other, set up websites devoted to their offbeat beliefs, set up forums, and get sufficient national support that they could reach critical mass and make enough noise that they could start getting tangible results.

[1] I'm going to assume that most HN readers are included in one of these classes of people.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8491076

[3] I wish I were joking here. Google with various combinations of terms like "agenda 21", "bike paths", "gun control" if you want details.