https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry_in_the_Land...
Having been a kid during the formative years of the Internet, I can tell you that the notion of "you can find everything on the internet" doesn't really start coming into play until the early 2000s. In the late 90s, having to do research generally meant schlepping yourself to the library and finding encyclopedias or other research materials. Or, if you were lucky, maybe you had something like Microsoft Encarta, an encyclopedia on a CD-ROM!
That was a bit later, though. In the age of physical disk swapping, you would ask friends, or prepare for an audience with That One Guy Who Has Everything And Knows Everything.