I was stuck on dial-up until mid-2006! Ah, the days when even doing something as common as watching a YouTube video were simply impossible. **shudders**Spike-X brings back bad memories:
Basically, the avatars were kept to a smaller size back in the days when a lot of people *cough* still had dialup connections, and a whole bunch of larger images would take too long to load. Also, I guess server space and bandwidth were more expensive back then.