My family wasn't rich and we had a "connected computer" in 97/98 before ad-tech really took over. Getting online was far less costly than the computer itself.
Damn an in my country (Indonesia) even in 2010 it's still the other way around. Even to this day I can't see my fellow countrymen paid for anything online partly because everything used to be so expensive we always have to find cheaper (pirated) version. By comparison privacy is worthless (for us).
Did you also have access to free email (beyond a measly few MBs), maps, video hosting, and private data storage? Because that's what ad-tech enabled. Getting online wasn't the hard part.
Not saying that ad-tech is purely good, of course.
