I would agree that it was different, but I also think this may be history viewed through rose-tinted glasses somewhat.

> There were also more low hanging fruit to develop software that makes people’s lives better.

In principle, maybe. In practice, you had to pay for everything. Open source or free software was not widely available. So, the profit motive was there. The conditions didn’t exist yet for the profit model we have today to really take off, or for the appreciation of it to exist. Still, if there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, that means the maturity of software was generally lower, so it’s a bit like pining for the days when people lived on the farm.

> There was also less investor money floating around so it was more important to appeal to end users.

I’m not so sure this appeal was so important (and investors do care about appeal!). If you had market dominance like Microsoft did, you could rest on your laurels quite a bit (and that they did). The software ecosystem you needed to use also determined your choices for you.

> To me it seems tech has devolved into a big money making scheme with only the minimum necessary actual technology and innovation.

As I said earlier, the profit motive was always there. It was just expressed differently. But I will grant you that the image is different. In a way, the mask has been dropped. When facebook was new, no one thought of it as a vulgar engine for monetizing people either (I even recall offending a Facebook employee years ago when I mentioned this, what should frankly have been obvious), but it was just that. It was all just that, because the basic blueprint of the revenue model was there from day one.

>In practice, you had to pay for everything.

As a private individual, you didn't actually have to pay for anything once you got an Internet connection. Most countries never even tried enforcing copyright laws against small fish. DRM was barely a thing and was easily broken within days by l33t teenagers.