My first memories of Husker football are in the late 70s(my first real specific memory is the 1978 win over Oklahoma). So I remember the 90s national championships very well. I also remember just how bad things seemed to be just before that. Of course, they weren't anywhere near as bad as they have been in recent years, but you wouldn't know it by the reaction of the fanbase.
The 1990 season was possibly the most disappointing of the Tom Osborne years and certainly the most disappointing in my memory, when we ended the season 1-3 which included a huge 4th quarter collapse at home against Colorado and blowout losses to Oklahoma and Georgia Tech. People were seriously starting to question whether TO had lost his touch and some were suggesting that it was time to move on from him. The 1991 season was only a little better-we won the Big 8 title, but got shut out against Miami in the Orange Bowl. The 1992 season gave little reason for optimism as we had 3 losses, including a stunning loss to a bad Iowa State team(TO's only loss to a team that finished with a losing record) and the bowl game loss which had become routine at that point. Based on what we had seen in the previous few years, even the most optimistic fan wouldn't have predicted that the next season would begin one of the most impressive 5 year runs ever in college football history.
So comparing it to today, although we are obviously much worse now than we were then, considering the standards we had at that time, fan optimism as a whole wasn't a whole lot better than it is now, and patience was probably even lower. Even though we are much further from winning a championship now than we were then, it certainly didn't seem that way. Yes, I am well aware of how far we have to go, even to get back to being a consistently good team, let alone winning a championship. But my memories of how dark things seemed to be just before our great run in the mid 90s always leave me with the optimism that we can be great again, even if we don't reach the heights we did of that period.