As late as the 2000s. The internet didn’t always have the content it does now. News agencies took a long time to adopt it. Publications scientific or otherwise weren’t all published online. Content aggregators hadn’t scraped and indexed it all. Random pseuds hadn’t social media profiles to digest and spit out their takes on it. None of that existed which has led us to this point where internet arguments are two doofuses frantically dumping the results of that on each other.