It takes GIGA-hertz machines to achieve that. On highly parallelized architectures. Often with SSD storage. When I started on the Internet I had a 33 MHz 32 bit CPU, just for comparison, and I used a word processor on 8 bit and with WYSIWYG and a modern GUI on 16 bit. So you telling me "it loads really fast and looks nice" leaves me unsure about my feelings, considering a wider context. It's just some (passive) graphics and text!
So what? It still is just text and graphics! The fact that it "looked like shit" was far more attributable to the absence of designers and professionals at the time, and of professionally designed templates.
HTML tables for layout sucked - but you could get graphics and text on the page, nothing more is on that page we are talking about here.
Do you think to get better graphics and better layout options for static HTML pages we needed to first get Gigahertz Intel i5 CPUs, combined with Gigabytes of RAM and capable graphics GPUs?
