When Altair Basic came out? PCs had a huge ecosystem of software by the time I was born, in the 80s. The Altair was released in January 1975 and Altair Basic was released in March 1975.
Ditto Google - I don't recall search being all that useful. I went to Yahoo to find websites until I was introduced to Google in 2000.
Google search was awesome. Even Altavista was awesome back at the beginning before they let their search results become polluted by spam.