The closest thing dialup ever got to instantaneous was text-based terminal interfaces. And I remember agonizingly slow load times in Lynx just as often as agonizingly slow load times in Mosaic, NN and IE. Our expectations change, however, and as tech speeds up, we ask “why aren’t people optimizing for what we care about, performance?” But there’s a multitude of answers, many of which are sadly non-technical. Speed and responsiveness often take a backseat, but improvements do happen. (AMP, CDNs like CloudFlare, use of native apps, etc.)

Yeah, didn't mean old modems, more like applications. My 300 baud modem was pretty slow. But applications were always very fast compared to most new stuff.

Yes, exactly. So while today on a slow connection you can find yourself waiting a long time for Gmail to load up and let you read your email, in the days of 300 baud your email would be downloaded in batch and your mail reader would come up instantly, letting you peruse and read your email at leisure.

I don't recall anything on the internet being instantaneous 20 years ago. Surely you're misremembering?

I also don't find that new smartphones have much touch-based interface latency; but even so, that kind of latency doesn't have anything to do with the internet, nor the halcyon days of late 1998. To my recollection browsing the web in the late 90s was far more exciting but also far less useful than today.

The modern internet has a lot of inefficiency, but I don't see how you could seriously claim it's slower than what we had 20 years ago. Sometimes heavy web applications are relatively slow because they're underoptimized, but that's less of a technology failing and more of a developer failing. Most websites load spectacularly faster, and perform better, than all but completely static HTML websites from two decades ago despite having much larger byte footprints.

Yep - I remember very carefully planning which mp3s I wanted so that I could dedicate my small window of modem time each day to download them because each one took 10-30 minutes. Sometimes I was able to get through a full game of Age of Empires before disconnecting due to lag or because my dad needed to make a phone call. I find long page loads due to excessive javascript as annoying as the next person, but I'm much happier with the internet in 2018 than 1998.

Ok, maybe I was spoiled with 100 Mbps connection at the time but I was mainly talking about Apps. They were not web-based, all written in C, some form of BASIC or Assembler.

I find exactly the opposite.

Some websites overloaded the 98 web by being an entire page of diced and sliced graphics that assembled the page. Most were mainly text and appeared pretty much instantaneously. Images came slower than the article you could be already reading if you were on dial up.

One of the things I dislike about the current web, is how slow most sites have become - mostly thanks to an absurd overhead of JS and third party SaaS just to display a text article with a few pictures. The number of sites that will unreadbly bounce the content around as various web fonts, icon fonts and other trivia load is pretty ridiculous. It's the main reason I now browse with JS off and white list JS for a tiny few.

My computer from 20 years ago was a lot snappier than anything I've used today. And this is not just nostalgia, there is data to back it up:

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

That's interface latency, not internet speed.

And it's due to bloat; the same kind of bloat that leads people to add megabytes of javascript and other resources to simple articles.

Use a rotary phone for a couple weeks.

You were using a rotary phone 20 years ago?

A rotary phone was at least instant physical feedback...