Here’s an article I think helps describe where we were when the Phantom Menace trailer was put online.

It’s astonishing to think how much things have changed in the last decade and a half, and many of those changes began for me that very year. In 1998 I got my first email address – Hotmail, of course. I hand-wrote my initial essays, until I got a word processor with a three-line LCD screen. My phone was a payphone at the end of the corridor – you had to hope someone passing by would answer it and then knock on your door – which is not coincidentally why I got my first mobile phone that year, an Ericsson T28.

We had the iTunes Trailers site and Ain’t It Cool News, but no Facebook, no Twitter and no YouTube. Into this veritable stone age came the first teaser for “The Phantom Menace” on 18 November 1998, six months before the film’s release.

The first trailer was shown before Universal’s “Meet Joe Black”, Disney’s “The Waterboy” and 20th Century Fox’s “The Siege” at 75 US and Canadian theatres. Fans queued around the block to get in, watch the trailer – and then leave. Trailers were repeated after each movie, so some fans are reported to have ducked out before the feature presentation only to return at the end for a second glimpse of the preview.
https://www.cnet.com/news/how-the-star-wars-the-phantom-menace-trailer-made-web-history/