In the late nineties, my family had sectioned off a portion of our business (restaurant/hotel) to live in. It was a small town and broadband wasn't available for a reasonable price, so my mother ended up paying to get extra lines in the business, specifically for the Internet (and I'll never stop thanking her for that). Our ISP was down the street, so there was no long distance calling.
I remember playing Rainbow Six day in and day out online. We somehow managed up to 16 players without too much lag. Sometimes you'd get a host that was far away and the game became completely unplayable. (You'd get shot and either never see who shot you or see him seconds later)
I also recall using MPlayer for Rainbow Six, which was a fantastic online gaming community that would handle match making and provided chat rooms and using mics/webcams from within the chat room before launching the game. Over dial-up, the quality was surprisingly not bad. MPlayer was eventually purchased by GameSpy Arcade in 2000, unfortunately. (More info here with a fancy screenshot! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPlayer.com)
I also recall attempting to download a demo of Daikatana when it came out. I recall the demo being somewhere in the neighborhood of 100MB and it taking 11 hours to download. Of course, 8 hours into the download, the connection dropped. Second try was the charm though! And then my computer turned out to be too crappy to play it anyway. (The colors were all sorts of trippy and it stuttered along if you attempted to play) Shortly after this experience, I started seeing "download manager" programs pop-up that would handle dropped connections by letting you continue where you left off when you came back online. For dial-up users, you really couldn't afford not to have one.
Also, the Netscape Navigator craze. And websites full of flaming text and gifs, made for 640x480 resolutions. Always painful to look at.
This was all around the 98-00 era. I was about 12yrs old at the time. We eventually got 3Mbps/128Kbps after we moved a few years later and thought we were shittin' in tall cotton.