Later on as a teen I'd hear about a "free" OS that was good at running on limited hardware, which would be exciting to me in the very free-as-in gratis sort of way as a kid with an aging (different than previous paragraph, mid 90s) hand-me-down PC, no money or anyone to ask for money -- I had to go on a waiting list to get a CD mailed to me IIRC -- but then then I was up and running with my first linux server (RedHat 6), albeit isolated from the internet at large, but I'd get a whole slew of new interpreters and compilers to mess with (C, Python, Perl, PHP), and they all came with documentation, and stuff had sources I could read!!

During both periods my single mother would sporadically (when a sales guy convinced her) subscribe to cable for a few months at a time before realizing she couldn't afford it. We didn't own many VHS (to a detriment, renting favorites multiple times -- math and planning weren't in my mother's toolbox). Even if there were any real content available for our television, we just had the one and she used it for the entirety of her own downtime. There were internet trial floppies/CDs or ad-supported dial-up schemes etc., but I didn't have regular access to a reliable internet connection in my family home until I got my first job out of high school (writing C for embedded controller of a machine tool platform) and could pay for that with my own money.

If my mother were born 20 years later and made the same kind of life decisions, that rural backwoods is now served by a community project that provides affordable 100 megabit fiber to the premises we could probably keep on despite a late payment here or there (better service and value than the cable I have access to in a real metro area today, frustratingly). I would have hand-me-down iPad and iPhone (as would my mother -- giving us each our own screens with which to consume entertainment in parallel), little money with which to purchase software for these, no way to pirate software for them, no general purpose computer, and my mother could probably manage to keep her Netflix subscription paid for keeping us both with a tap of easy entertainment. My more curious forms of bored energy would probably be satisfied watching other people play PC games on Twitch or something or bulshitting with my peers (who would exist, me being less nerdy and society in general having become a bit more nerdy). By 18 I'd know a lot more about internet culture and games (and probably have more friends) but I wouldn't be able to raise my hand when the careers counselor comes by asking if any of the students knows C (and that machine would probably have a proprietary runtime instead, and that company would probably have offshored those tasks before reaching out to the local high school).