I think that just means that users expected nothing to happen very quickly. You push a button, and would instantly get a beach ball, so you could get up and go elsewhere while you waited to see if this time it would actually work.

I'm all for fixing the million annoyances in modern UX. The Web was built by something even worse than a committee -- it was built by a thousand committees. But let's not have rose-colored glasses, either. Computers in 1983 and 1998 were immensely frustrating, and some of what makes computers slow today is also what makes them better than the half-baked, hard-to-use, fifty-pound monstrosities of the past. We can and should do better in the future, but not if we mis-remember the past.