I’m old enough to have had a debit card for the entirety of the webs life and I recall things differently: - Email wasn’t free (particularly in the pre-web day

I’m old enough to have had a debit card for the entirety of the webs life and I recall things differently: - Email wasn’t free (particularly in the pre-web days) - you had to pay for internet usage per phone call (and it used to be expensive before ISPs went mainstream!) - hosting wasn’t free (Geocities changed this but there were heavy limitations that even in the 90s surfers felt: storage space, ad banners injected into your site, no friendly domain name, etc) Most of the free stuff was pretty naff. But people didn’t mind because they used that free stuff for doing generally naff things with. There was a certain beauty to it, like walking through a car boot / yard sale you find the occasional gems but nobody had any illusions of greatness. What happened after was professional businesses making professional services free. That was the game changer. And it put a lot of non-free services out of business.