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.