Was the internet widely used in the early to mid 1980's?

I first encountered the internet when a professor in a computer science department told us that he just got on a network to share work with colleagues at other colleges. He was kind of giddy about it. How they could share small text files of their work with each other. This was 1982 or 1983. The university some time around this time was connected to the internet. I would be surprised if it had a couple dozen or so users, all professors and researchers. No students.

Computer Science departments and science institutions were getting on to share research and data.

It was all command line interface, text files. very primitive email. No graphical user interfaces or pointing devices etc. Very slow phone lines, slow modems. I am not sure if they were using ftp yet. Maybe. But, thats what they did, they transferred files.

It was widely used in the 1980's by U.S. Intelligence, and the Strategic Air Command(SAC) as a form of quick global communication. The Internet was created by the military. An agent in East Berlin could snap pictures of a SAM site, and send it to Omaha, NE in a few seconds.

No, it was really a niche/geek thing at that time. And there were no search engines, and not much for them to search.

Back then, though, there were plenty of places to look things up on paper, just as there are today.

No, it was not around for normal use don't include it.