Prodigy launched online ads from the 1980s. AOL as well.
HotWired (Wired's first online venture) sold their first banner ads in 1994.
DoubleClick was founded in 1995.
Neither were limited to 90's hardware:
Web browsers were available for machines like the Amiga, launched in 1985, and today you can find people who have made simple browsers run on 8-bit home computers like the C64.
Prodigy launched online ads from the 1980s. AOL as well.
HotWired (Wired's first online venture) sold their first banner ads in 1994.
DoubleClick was founded in 1995.
Neither were limited to 90's hardware:
Web browsers were available for machines like the Amiga, launched in 1985, and today you can find people who have made simple browsers run on 8-bit home computers like the C64.
I actually used an Amiga to browse the web, back in 1994 or 1995. I started with Lynx, but then I switched to a graphical browser (probably Mosaic).
This was an Amiga 500 with maxed-out RAM (8 MB) and a hard drive.
If such an alternate reality has internet of any speed above "turtle in a mobility scooter" then there for sure would be ads and tracking.
The young WWW had garish flashing banner ads.
The young web had no ads at all.
For a very narrow definition of "the young web".
The period without ads lasted ~4 years, during which almost nobody used the web, and even fewer used a graphical browser.
Mosaic 0.5 was first released in January '93 (yes, there were other graphical browsers preceding it, like Viola, but none saw broad distribution)
Netscape was first launched in October '94.
By '94 the first banner ads existed.
DoubleClick started selling banner ads in '95.
You're misremembering the young web.
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