Computers are undoubtedly more powerful now than they were in the 90s. Although computing capabilities of the 90s seem weak compared to today's standards, they were not so inadequate that we couldn't train and run a network comprising thousands of parameters. I vividly recall the early 2000s when I was in college. Neural networks were seen as a sort of "fringe" technology in a series of statistics courses. We were mostly shown examples with 6 or 12 neurons, and nobody mentioned the possibility of scaling up to hundreds of neurons. Around that time, we already had sophisticated games like The Elder Scrolls III. We could have easily scaled up the network size by at least an order of magnitude at home, not to mention the capabilities that big companies possessed at that time.