At college we used to have rooms with 24 X-terminals with 1280x1024 screens - huge for the day. All on one single shared 10mbit!
And wow it was speedy. Because all we did was locally rendered motif window managers, locally rendered fonts and widgets etc. Windows weren't moved animated but just the border was shown while moving.
Fast forward to the 56k days and everyone was running mosaic and netscape scrolling to pages loaded with bitmap images, scrolling marquee text (server rendered usually) and animated under construction images. It was anything but speedy at that point - lol.
From that point onwards things moved on really fast.
