in the 90s there was no technology to have an overlay of an ad following you while you scroll and when you close it a new one appears more aggressively. Or to let you start reading an article and then suddenly appear in your face not allowing you to continue. Yes, there was the worse situation that they would open a whole new window, but browsers started restricting it quite early
Well at least in the early 2000s we certainly had the cascading cavalcade of pop-up windows that you couldn't get rid of, I do remember that. Maybe not in the '90s though because it probably would have caused your computer to meltdown. Heh
I think it has gotten worse in that now we have higher bandwidth, faster computers, and more advanced web standards so ads can be an even higher level annoying. If we had the same type of ads back in the 90s that we have today, they would never load and if they tried to they would bring your computer to its knees.