In the late 1950s, the Commander caught a whiff of discontent brewing among television consumers, an annoyance at having to sit through the new commercial breaks that now interrupted nearly every program since NBC had first introduced them in the mid-1950s. So he ordered Zenith's engineers to devise a way to give people more control over what their televisions were doing—in particular, the power to “tune out annoying commercials.” He wanted, we would say, an ad-blocker.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 509