We used telnet. There were no graphics per se. Before www the "interactive" internet was gopher and wais and co.

Navigation was moving a cursor around to highlight points of interest, some of which would be links to further stuff or controls to do something like go back or forwards.

Install lynx or links2 (ie text mode browsers) and you'll get the idea.

The vaguely graphic efforts with browsable content that you might recognise before www were the likes of Compuserve. That got you a sort of forum style interface.

It's quite hard to explain just how fast things have moved over the last 40 odd years (I'm 1970 to date - 55). I should also point out that my granddad saw rather a lot of change from 1901 to 1989. To be honest the last 15 odd years are even madder than the previous 25 and that's just my own personal recollection.