Practical, heavier than air flight was made possible due to internal combustion engines. It's also still less practical and more expensive for some applications

Practical, heavier than air flight was made possible due to internal combustion engines. It's also still less practical and more expensive for some applications e.g., cargo than other options. Practical, low-latency distributed databases based on "invoke consensus protocol on every commit to the log" would be made possible (on limited size local networks) when networking gear with performance exceeding 10GigE/Infiniband becomes "commodity". Even then, it will still be impractical and too expensive for some scenarios. At the present time, the fact that I said "invoke consensus on every commit to the log" and "low latency" in the same sentence is making distributed systems engineers cringe (I would _not_ advocate building such a system). The fact that I said "Infiniband" and commodity in the same sentence is also making systems administrators and DBAs cringe.