Privoxy was an offshoot from IJB, the Internet Junkbuster which I guess started around 1996.

If interested in reading about the aversion to web ads and concern over privacy in the 1990's and early 2000's, check out IJB's old website. It is loaded with information. The IJB code is still around in at least a few places. While I prefer local DNS and local SSL-enabled proxies to filter ads, believe it or not ijb, as old as it is, still compiles and runs.

To quickly get the list of urls from archive.org, something like:

        curl -o ijb.urls https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=www.junkbuster.org\&fl=timestamp,original

        exec sed '
        /^[12][0-9]* h/!d;
        /^[12][0-9]* h/{
        s/^/http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\//;
        s/ /\//;
        #^M is "\r"
        s/^M//g;
        }' ijb.urls