Newsgroups are on Usenet and they are pretty old. Usenet probably does pre-date the web, although maybe not by much. I’m not sure of that. It was immensely popular when the Internet was still young and not used much by the common folk.
It is text based, although there are lots of pictures on it encoded with uuencode or yenc. You can get a newsreader for most operating systems but most, if not all, ISPs have dropped their own news servers. You can surf the web to find free news servers but they’re generally unreliable and don’t carry much in the way of newsgroups. And there are thousands of news groups.