Yup, there was that too. I remember when doing a ca 2 MB download of NetHack felt like a chore...
I remember these times as well.
I grew up - so to say - at University studying meanwhile watching the Internet actually grow. It too HOURS to download something that was 1-2 MB big ! So slow was the connection at the PC I worked with ... FTP, of course. Gopher was much faster, then.
And then the first browsers. Mosaic was my favourite one.
RAM was extremely expensive. Windows NT I think it was 3.5 needed 24 MB RAM minimum - which costed several hundred or even thousands of German D-Mark !
At that time, I came across a neat little program calkled "Pegasus Mail" for Netware. And I still use it today ! (The windows version, though.)