DSA also has much smaller signatures, which surely was a nice advantage. On top of that, DSA was limited to 1024 bit keys and 160 bit hashes until the standard

DSA also has much smaller signatures, which surely was a nice advantage. On top of that, DSA was limited to 1024 bit keys and 160 bit hashes until the standard was extended and the extension propagated to implementations again. RSA signatures gained a lot of use while this was happening.