[xvinci]

I think you got it wrong: Buying hardware and setting it up and keeping it running, just as described, is / was a high barrier of entry cost-wise (Not to mention the fact that people used to actually running hardware in a data center are scarce). Many (sometimes poor) people could not / would not take that bet.

With "cloud computing" (to me even before there was the word cloud around, but thats nitpicking) suddenly your only real investment needed was your own time, which to you is "free" if you can somehow make a living on the side (some people simply accept to live poor for some time, some had their family, etc.). The few Euros for a vserver (or "webspace" at the time) were doable for most if not all. Not to mention student programs, free credits to lock you down to hyperscaler X, etc. we all have nowadays.

Or comparing it to myself: I learnt programming at the age of 12 because we got a free environment alongside our ISP contract for executing PHP with a mysql database behind it. I would never have spent any money. Now I have been a professional software developer for almost 16 years which I say is thanks to that way lower barrier of entry that was created along the lines of ~ 1995 - 2005.