They didn't seem to state a year this was occurring in, and from what is written it sounds like the internet connection was insanely slow.
Back in the 95-2010 range so many places outside of towns had pretty much no internet. Maybe you'd get a meg or two up and down. Can't do much offsite with that.
It sounds like one of the VMs was a samba file server, to serve shared files for the workstations in the office. That was a common thing to run locally in the office, to keep latency down.
Back in the 95-2010 range so many places outside of towns had pretty much no internet. Maybe you'd get a meg or two up and down. Can't do much offsite with that.