There was stuff that was always slow, stuff that involved processing a whole lot of data. Like building, or archiving, or generating reports etc. People wanted

There was stuff that was always slow, stuff that involved processing a whole lot of data. Like building, or archiving, or generating reports etc. People wanted faster computers for that. UI was not slow, text editing was not slow, networking was not slow (WWW was, of course, because loading GIFs on dialup took time, but telnet connections into a box with less compute and less memory than my home router has nowadays were snappy). User interaction used to be real-time, non-interactive data-crunching tasks were really slow.