So people waited for 20 seconds to load each page?

Yes. The tolerance for slow-loading pages has shrunk dramatically since the early days of the web. Admittedly, 20 seconds was pushing it and people tried to reduce image sizes and such things to make it faster. But I recall in the late 90s, when I was selling CMS software to IBM, they had a rule that all pages needed to load within 3 seconds, and that was considered fast in those days.