there are people here that can tell the stories better of course. MarcA was building the browser with other grad students and whomever, and they ultimately formed a company called Netscape. That product was called Netscape Navigator, and sold to consumers in a commercial software box, like a big book, similar to Adobe Photoshop and dozens of other huge programs in that day ("shrink wrap software").

Through the 1990s many Usenet users talked about ads on the Internet via usenet lists, everyone knew about AOL and their business model. The opinion among most coders in public was that ads on the Internet would "ruin it." Public surveillance on the scale that is common now, was a topic from comic books. etc