My first contact with the web (I had been in the internet for some time already) was when a collegue at university told me about the Arena browser, and this new system, “like Gopher, but with Hypertext and pictures”. And yes, I’ve seen the CERN website, served from Tim Barners-Lee’s NeXT cube, too.

So yes, I knew the web before there were ads, the internet when services were normally open to all sides, and when people on the internet that were actually much smarter than average.