I remember wanting to be important by upgrading the size of my monitor from the default 14" to 21" but unfortuantely, it also took up 50% of your desk space so I split the difference and lived with 17".
My very first work experience in a small software house in 1996 and their internet connection was ISDN so it had to dial-up and then got the staggering speed of 64Kb/s, you could also hear it so occasionally the boss would ask who was using it i.e. costing whatever we were metered at, which was probably like £1 for 5 minutes.
The internet was a bit different more homely in those days. Back in 1996 we hired a guy as network administrator. On his first day at work, we got an email from a network admin who was reading Usenet. He'd seen our new guy had posted the root password for his former place of work on Usenet (as some kind of revenge for something or other) and had managed to work out where the guy was now working and our contact details. We frog-marched our new employee out of the door and changed all the passwords.
In 1999 I was the first person I knew to get a TFT flatscreen monitor. It had the awesome capability of 1024x768 resolution at 14".
Like OP I got made redundant in the winter of 2001 after the collapse, from Zeus Technology who had a high performance single-thread select-based webserver. We could feel the cascade failure as our ISP customers went bankrupt or stopped paying their invoices.
I badgered my parents into getting 64k ISDN installed at home in ~2000. Whatever the pitch was, IIRC my true motivation was to get double-digit ping times for Quake etc.
Playing from the north of Scotland on typical UK servers, that went from 200+ ms unstable on a normal modem, to 70ms stable. LPB† status, wahoo!
† http://lpb.urbanup.com/36431