Ironically (and anecdotally) I remember pages loading much more slowly back then than now, on average. People comparing the two need to remember just how much faster and better optimized computers are now, as well as the speed of broadband versus dialup.
"Ironic" in that a lot of people here complain about how slow the modern web is versus the simpler purely static web of the past, when the modern web even with all the javascript BS is qualitatively faster.