Advertising drove me away from watching television and listening to the radio. And those aren't even the nasty, spying sort of ads that we have on the web.

I really see the day coming when I can no longer defend myself against advertisers enough to make it worth continuing to use the web at all.

From my point of view, cable has the easiest kind of advertising to fully skip. It's distinct from programming and can be fast forwarded.

I find that preferable to the web and streaming. Being manipulated by unskippable previews and algorithms using personal data about me to show me an Amazon or Netflix controlled browse interface that tries to funnel me into watching what they consider optimal.

The first banner ad was in 1994.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-f...

The first web browser was introduced in 1990.

https://starry.com/blog/inside-the-internet/what-was-the-fir...

Advertising has been a part of the web for almost its entire history.

Therefore it would seem that the years the parent poster spent browsing an adless world were in the range 1990-1994.

And the web was basically useless to find any information back then.

Not at all. It was a magical wonderland of directories, forums, and secret links you'd pass around between friends. For the first time ever you could type in an address at the top of a window and just go there. We had never seen anything like that before, everything previously was a walled off program or service that hid everything under the hood.

Pretending advertising was built in from the beginning is just dishonest. It was a shift in the contract, we all got swept up in the early ad free web and it was amazing at first.

In these early years I learned so much, there was a pirated encyclopedia which was the first thing I downloaded, followed by learning how to shave, how to speak spanish, how to do my homework, how to tie a tie. The first time I got paid as a web developer was in 1993, still more than a year before the first ads, and like five years before ads actually started appearing in significant numbers.

None of this advertising is necessary, it was all just tacked on by corporations. This is to say nothing of tracking and profiling and targeting, which is simply evil.

I was in college then. My first internet connected app that I wrote was gopher based in 1994. You couldn’t find any useful information from most publications, it was basically useless for research, you definitely couldn’t do too much shopping. Shopping for computer equipment was still done by browsing the huge Computer Shopper magazines.

There wasn’t an easy way an easy way to search Usenet until 1995 when DejaNews became available. You would have never had the investment in internet infrastructure that allows everyone to get internet speeds at home that were unheard of even for businesses that were usually connected via a T1 if they had any internet at all.

Hit the monkey to win!

Congratulations! You've been chosen to win a free iPod!

Everyone fell for those at least once

Install Bonza Buddy!!

When did it not have ads? I remember seeing ads as early as 1993. AOL's browser was full of them. Sometimes they were just links at the bottom of a page thanking a sponsor, though.

AOL's garden (and Prodigy's before that) was always packed with ads from the first version, it was one of the reasons I hated AOL and was always just trying to get a simple TCP connection so I could just browse the web instead.

I don't think AOL shipped a normal browser until later than '93, they hated the web for obvious reasons and were actively fighting against it in those early years. They had something resembling a browser you could just type AOL keywords into, but that was only for their content. I remember I had to make a phone call to get a config change for a normal TCP connection to browse the web in some versions, that's how locked down AOL was.

I feel like if you have to actively look for it at the bottom of the page, it doesn't really qualify as an "ad" in the sense we're talking about here.