People were accessing applications and data on remote systems and using digital distribution for software. The big differences are the available bandwidth (whi

People were accessing applications and data on remote systems and using digital distribution for software. The big differences are the available bandwidth (which does not depend upon the web) and that HTML/CSS/JS are platform independent client side languages. That said, much of the inefficiency of the web comes down to implementation. A site like HN is efficient since it has a well defined purpose and the design reflects that purpose. Many websites have less clearly defined purposes, provide a much larger scope of functionality, of depends upon general purpose frameworks. Those are all ways to diminish performance with little perceptible benefit to the end user, a.k.a. bloat. As for modern development, I'm not sure it is much more accessible than it was in years past. Yes, a big part of the appeal of web development in the 1990's was its accessibility. On the other hand, that was comparing mature general purpose development tools to one that had limited scope. You certainly weren't developing standalone applications in HTML/CSS/JS in the early days, and most of what was developed for online use was geared towards accessing data an less so to content creation.