Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting how our networks have gotten relatively much slower. When X11 was designed and for a long time afterwards, networks were fast enough. But now end user networking performance has plateaued much earlier and faster than computing power and app bandwidth requirements. 100M became the norm in the mid 90s, 1G in the mid 00s, but there was no 10G norm in 2010s or 100G norm in 2020s, we're still at almost th…
I think it has two reasons, first the price of the hardware required to do these speeds (plus the cable requirements + range limits), and WiFi. These slowdown is offset by improvements in video and audio codecs, transparent compression and better static compression formats. So, having 100mbps WAN connection at home is arguably provides more utility than having 100mbps 5 years ago. Unless you do professional photo/vid…
And yes, our apps adapted to working with less bandwidth. We don't know what kind of apps and computing we would have in the alternative universe where the norm would have been 10G connections 10 years ago.
For example lots of P2P stuff has been badly hampered by performance problems resulting in the centralization of the net in hands of big players.
There are lots of hard problems resulting from bad connectivity that result in big $$ tech funneling traditional net uses onto their services, by investing engineering efforts (and complexity) into heroic engineering feats to work around the bad connectivity. The complexity means high barrier to entry to compete with them. Codecs yes but also clever distributed caching, cloud storage, UIs that predict what the user does next, video calls have to go through corporate encoding/multiplexing proxies instead of p2p, file sharing has to be of the hard "sync most likely needed needed files" variety with proprietary server side smarts, instead of just "mount remote share", etc.