but dial-up modem bulletin boards were definitely a thing, in those days. Or Compuserv, if so inclined.
I wrote a BBS in Applesoft basic (and assembly, to trap some of the control characters and escape commands) and hosted it on my Apple ][. comms at 110/300 baud (full duplex!) or even 1200 baud where text comes faster than you can read, if you had the extra $400 for an AppleCat modem!
And magazines - some times later than Infocom we got Dungeon Master (on an ST although we were Amiga guys) as soon as possible, played it through, wrote a walkthrough with all the maps drawn to be the first to the magazine but got slightly beaten by another guy.
Fair enough. I was active in BBSs but didn’t remember walkthroughs. But then I knew a number of the authors and just asked them if I was really stuck :-)
Yep, they were out there. Some folks got really upset about walkthroughs and/or spoilers, as though it was cheating, saying "it was hard for me to figure out, it should be hard for others, too!" Many debates about the ethics of walkthroughs.
So yeah, walkthroughs were popular. Another favorite was Easter Eggs (hidden features). I remember one particular firestorm on my BBS -- an author claimed there was an Easter Egg in the Atari Battlezone stand-up 3D vector graphics arcade game. (For those who aren't familiar, you drive a tank and shoot at other tanks, looking through a periscope and driving with differential sticks). The promise was, if one drove far enough toward the volcano/mountain in the background and fired the gun or spun around a certain number of times, you could reach a city where an urban battle would commence.
Really exciting stuff, right? Of course we now know it was all nonsense, but boy did that ignite a conversation.
At the time it was just crazy enough to be plausible and we were just gullible enough to believe it, leading to many wasted quarters (some of them my own) trying to reach that fabled tank battle city.
walkthroughs were very popular topics.