People whose only experience is with modern hardware and networks really have a hard time getting the first point. As somebody who started coding around the tim

People whose only experience is with modern hardware and networks really have a hard time getting the first point. As somebody who started coding around the time IRC was created, hardware and networks are amazingly good compared to what we had at the time. In the mid-90s, years after IRC was written, I set up a distributed system for the financial traders I was working for. Our between-cities links were 64 kb/s guranteed and could burst all the way up to 256 kb/s. And those links were not super reliable. These were connecting systems with Pentium processor running ~90 MHz with ~8 MB RAM. They did very, very little compared with even the cheapest server slice you can get with AWS. This is one of those things, like George Washington never knowing about dinosaurs, where it's just hard to comprehend how people thought back in the olden days.