Memories from '96: We had these Sun computers at the university we called "cpu servers". At home we ran Linux (or sometimes Windows 3/95 with Exceed) on like a 486. In between a 10 Mbit/s Ethernet network. Everything had public IPs. Cleartext telnet was still ok.

We ran those weird X11-based apps on these "cpu servers" required for courses that way. Web browsing was faster locally.