Yes. People were learning languages and no one thought they needed some native stranger from the Internet to teach them. It was difficult, slow or expensive, to communicate with people who lived very far, but people communicated more with their neighbours. Instead of audio, video or text chat you had a phone, but international calls were expensive. To get educated, they had to use books and other printed stuff. Many people, especially the more educated, kept many books at home. For information and current affairs you had newspapers, TV and radio. They also watched TV a lot as a form of entertainment: movies, documentaries, talk shows. For a long time TV was a central object at every home that the family gathered around.  If you wanted to buy anything you had to go to a physical store. Music was on physical media: records, cassettes, and finally CDs. These were all sold in shops. There were physical stores where you could rent a movie to watch, also on physical media.There was no email. They mostly used phones, and fax for documents instead.

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