Same (I started writing JavaScript when it was called LiveScript in the Netscape betas), and I remember how the vDOM hype was conspicuously short on rigorous benchmarks – people would compare it to heavyweight frameworks which did things like touch elements repeatedly or do innerHtml cycles and say it was fast.
More specifically, they would use the default font, which IE in particular had set to Times New Roman, so that is what most people saw. To add insult to injury, there was no way to configure it for a very long time.
To this day I wonder if this particularly strange choice of a serif font that is very clearly intended primarily for printed documents rather than on-screen legibility is why this entire notion of using user-selected fonts for web pages has largely withered. What if they went with, say, Verdana instead?
Same, except my web backgrounds were in sepia. I had one of those old sepia monochrome monitors, so no grey for me. Or colors for that matter.
I even made my first website on that monitor (complete with animated gifs and <blink>, of course) - and seeing it finally on a color monitor was... interesting.
I was around for DHTML days, and as I recall, it was just a generic term for the ability to manipulate the actual (not virtual) DOM programmatically from JS.