I can still sort of remember that in the 90s, but was mainly reading magazines in the late 90s and early 2000s, so I probably missed out on some of that. I did go back and read a lot of old magazines on microfiche at the library a few years ago (I think Byte magazine) and yeah...a lot of ads, but I guess they would have been super useful pre-internet. Did you use the BBS as well? I was too young when that was common.