Well, those are brokerages. I assume what you mean is that it was more common to call your broker on the phone and place an order (at a fairly high fee in most cases). That's fair. Even in the US, online trading really came in contemporaneously with the dot-com era. That said, even the newish online brokerages were regulated to a degree we don't see with cryptocurrencies.

Yes that's a more accurate characterization.