Was new to me, but it seems "slippy map" is open-streetmap's terminology for a generic zoomable-pannable web map view, here used to refer to any such UI - whether backed by OSM or google or bing or whoever's map data. Feels like a weird word choice to me, when 'map' was right there, but who are we to judge.
Before Google Maps came out, online maps all looked like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20060428160705/http://www.multim... and this: https://web.archive.org/web/20050528023529/http://maps.yahoo... View the map a single tile at a time, no dragging the map, no moving by less than a tile, no zooming with the mousewheel, every move and zoom a full pageload. (You'll also notice the older maps are much higher contrast…
That seems expected, since XMLHttpRequest wasn't really broadly standard until 2003/4 or so. Mapquest and other incumbents didn't move fast enough to use it.