Nice article, but somewhat overstates how bad 1995 was meant to be.

A single image generally took nothing like a minute. Most people had moved to 28.8K modems that would deliver an acceptable large image in 10-20 seconds. Mind you, the full-screen resolution was typically 800x600 and color was an 8-bit palette… so much less data to move.

Moreover, thanks to “progressive jpeg”, you got to see the full picture in blocky form within a second or two.

And of course, with pages was less busy and tracking cookies still a thing of the future, you could get enough of a news site up to start reading in less time that it can take today.

One final irk is that it’s little overdone to claim that “For the first time in history, you can exchange letters with someone across the world in seconds”. Telex had been around for decades, and faxes, taking 10-20 seconds per page were already commonplace.