That page appears to be about 100K, so I think it would probably have taken at least 15-20 seconds to load on dial-up? Probably back in the day you would have been swearing at how bloated it was.

I worked for a newspaper around the period this article was published (~2000) and we had a strict 120kb limit per page, aiming more for ~90kb, for the exact reasons you suggest.

And we can now measure webpages in Doooms (JFYI):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13211120

https://twitter.com/xbs/status/626781529054834688