When mining started
Between January 2010 and July 2010, the difficulty increased from 1.3 to 244.2. That’s almost 200x within 6 months. Which sounds huge was actually growth from a tiny little level. Bitcoin was roughly one year old.
People who happened to have heard of the project, connected their PC to the network and started mining this „magic internet coin“. Bitcoin had made it from an idea in the whitepaper of an anonymous person in some nerd internet forum to something, that was actually running and growing fast.
Mining today
Today the difficulty is at 110,568,428,300,950 and almost nobody can imagine you once got 50 BTC for mining a block with your home PC. You need big computer farms with specialized machines today, to have the chance to get a reward of ~3 BTC.