There was a time when if you wanted coins you had to either mine them or trade pizzas for them.
Nope. Even then you could buy BTC for gaming currencies and other stuff. Even some accepted paypal. 5$ for 1000 BTC
You can still find such forum postings in the internet. Scammers were not that popular than today.
And a PC that is always on in IDLE consumes much less power than a CPU miner. Buying or Trading BTC for other stuff was easier and much more profitable.