I agree with you statement. But I do have a - genuine, absolutely not sarcastic - question. As products and services were not meant for the purposes you mentioned, how was money made? Did everything have a price upfront and was nothing ‘free’?

An amazing amount was free and usable. Usenet was used for the stuff that is now broken among Facebook (non private use), Twitter, stackexchange, etc. free/libre software did exist, and though limited in scope, where it existed it was often better. Gcc wasn’t as good a compiler as some vendors, but was better than some in code generation, and better than all in standard compliance, error messages and general UI. emacs and vi were the better editors around.

NCSA Mosaic and Server (that started the web) were free. The web was free and a huge percentage of it informative / labor of love free from commercial interest.

There was a lot of free/gratis but not free/libre software as well.

But also, you had to pay for a lot more things than you do today. WYSIWYG Word processors and spell checkers, for example, were expensive, and there was no free alternative (TeX was, it was superior in quality but with abysmal UI)

I would gladly return the net, and possibly the software world, back to that state. A lot of people assume that without ads the net cannot exist - but it did, it was informative, and useful.

Quite a lot of it was, as always, pirated.

There obviously was a mainstream tech industry that charged for its products. Often these were unaffordable to amateurs. But, since SaaS was infeasible, the software had to be shipped on physical media and run on isolated computers, which meant that it could be pirated. That got a lot of people into the industry.

There was also the hybrid model of "shareware", where you were encouraged to make copies and give to your friends - but if you liked it you were asked to mail some money to the author. Possibly the last great shareware product was the original DOOM - the demo version fit on four floppy disks, and you could mail off for the release version with more levels/weapons.

there was of course payment for products and services. but there were also demos, shareware, and the equivalents of today's "social media" and "metaverse" but everything was not cynically designed to extract money from people.