E trade and Ameritrade were new companies at the time. Buying stocks on your own without your bank/a brokerage was not commonplace actually and that was a pretty substantial barrier to entry.
Well, those are brokerages. I assume what you mean is that it was more common to call your broker on the phone and place an order (at a fairly high fee in most cases). That's fair. Even in the US, online trading really came in contemporaneously with the dot-com era. That said, even the newish online brokerages were regulated to a degree we don't see with cryptocurrencies.