Memories from '96: We had these beefy/expensive Sun computers at the university we called "cpu servers". At home we ran Linux with XFree86 (or sometimes Windows 95/NT with Exceed) on like a 486. In between a 10 Mbit/s Ethernet network. Everything had public IPs. Cleartext telnet was still the norm.

We ran some weird X11-based apps on these Sun machines required for courses that way. Web browsing was faster locally, even with a lowly 486.