Quite a slice of history. It's amazing how much the internet has become gentrified since the days when a plain hypertext document sufficed for one of the biggest space agencies in the world.
Back in the day people used to complain about these huge background images just as much as purists today complain about >1MB JS/CSS assets, which given Moore's law & the increase in network speeds works out to be the same thing, relatively speaking.
1. http://mars.nasa.gov/MPF/gif/rca.gif -> 56K =~ 55854 bytes
That said this wasn't really a comment about time to load the page back then, but rather the massive amount of data pulled for exactly the same content now.
There's also things like Gmail, FB, etc that do a lot of things that fundamentally wouldn't be achievable then. But i still think that there's a lot of strictly unnecessary content pulled. Things that are logically needed given the way the code is written, but i feel a bunch is overwritten, and a bunch is for stuff that i don't personally need/want, so why ship that to anyone? ;)
* Ok, ignoring bright yellow text on a white background until the swirly background image comes into existence. I guess the early internet was similar to those old "awful myspace page" competitions :D
So while your comparison is apt, the difference is that bad web programmers no longer pretend to care, which is the underlying cause of the nostalgic bitching.
It doesn't mean that web programmers care less, it just means technology moved on.
This site loads within of < 1 second for me.
Any modern site? I can wait 2-3 Minutes to even begin to see text.
And thanks to the assholes who want to prevent the "flash of unstyled content" I just see blank white for 2-3 minutes before seeing any actual text.
By now I've written a custom tool and proxy based on Mozilla’s reader mode so I have an app, open the link in it, and it downloads only the extracted text, in markdown.
Been noticing less 'Print' versions these days, too. So much for convenience & 'save the trees' if you want to print out a page without the secondary cruff.
Compare visiting a simple blog post on many sites now. You visit the page, get a brief period of NO text while some slow JS loads. Then all the page assets will bounce around as other elements and JS is loaded, then there's a major refresh as the lazy loading font shows up.
The images are now often deliberately blurred and detail free (Medium) - to show how clever they are using lazy loading. Well, when it triggers successfully, which I find isn't that reliable. Had they provided a very low res starter image rather than blurry obfuscation it'd give something over progressive JPGs.
I'd say the user experience has worked out to be a lot worse. Of course it's higher res and prettier. That's avoiding even mentioning the many who still pay for bandwidth.
Unless, of course, one used a very modern browser, and the page author cared to annotate every image's size. Something that nearly nobody did.
Actually 8 seconds, because modem speeds were/are measured in kilobits per second.