It's worth remembering that once upon a time, at least, there was no such thing as index investing or even low cost investing. Trades & brokers were expensive,

It's worth remembering that once upon a time, at least, there was no such thing as index investing or even low cost investing. Trades & brokers were expensive, and shares were frequently literally pieces of paper. My father still has paper shares from that age. They live in a bank vault. Buying stock directly from your employer skipped the broker & Wall Street. We all know picking stocks is perilous- but what do you if it's 1970, six years before VFINX was even created? You pick your own stocks, hire a broker, or buy expensive mutual funds. Don't feel like a good stock picker? The safe play, of course, is to buy big reputable companies with a long history of stable stock- see, GE. Anyway, I just wanted to point out it was something of a different world back then. I think it wasn't even that long ago that you typically still had to buy whole shares of things. Which, as I'm sure you can imagine, is a big part of why DRIP is another recent phenomenon.