> The internet existed in a major fashion before there was any notable amount of advertising on the internet. We got Netscape Navigator, Yahoo! and the famous

> The internet existed in a major fashion before there was any notable amount of advertising on the internet. We got Netscape Navigator, Yahoo! and the famous AT&T banner ad all in the same year. Even still, we had irc, email and newsgroup spam in the preceding decades (even if you can still call that "the Internet"). I would see advertising prior to this on commercial online platforms (like AOL and compuserve) -- but I can accept that this might not have been considered "the Internet". I was thinking maybe you define the few years between "the WWW" was invented (1991, if you believe some accounts) to when it became popular (1993, maybe) as some kind of "golden era" of Internet when there weren't any banner ads, despite the fact early websites were directly advertising for eachother (a kind of "sign on the local business" perhaps?). This interpretation seems unkind though. So I'm left thinking you and these couple other people are just wrong. I simply can't imagine the Internet before advertising, and I doubt most people could. I have been online since the 1980s and I have in that entire time seen ads, so if you actually meant something by this statement, I'll need some help unpacking it.