I’m old enough to remember a time when you had to buy a newspaper to see the prices of stocks. There were pages upon pages of tickers and their closing prices from the day before. Best of all, the prices were all in 1/8ths of a dollar because that’s the smaller increment (market makers loved it!).
This article from The Onveston Letter shares a bunch of other ways markets were different that I, as a kid, never fully appreciated.
How People Invested Before The Internet Was A Thing [The Onveston Letter] – “Perhaps the most dramatic difference lies in trading costs. In the 1990s, trade commissions had widely dropped to ≈ $50 which was actually considered a significant improvement from the even higher fees of earlier decades.
To understand the magnitude of this, consider that a typical retail investor making ten trades per year would pay ≈ $500 in commissions alone, not accounting for bid-ask spreads and other hidden costs.”
Now it’s rare to find a brokerage that will charge you a commission to trade!