The popup ad was written by Ethan Zuckerman at Tripod.com around 1997. Zuckerman has said so publicly and at length, most memorably in a 2014 essay for The Atlantic in which he apologized for it. The origin is not in dispute and has not been for a long time. The mechanism Rob described to me is a pop-under, which is a variation on Zuckerman’s window, and the off-screen positioning trick is a refinement of a refinement. Claiming that as an invention is like claiming you invented the car because you found a way to disable the seatbelt chime.
https://galratner.substack.com/p/the-man-that-invented-the-popup
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