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

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.