> had no real cost. Can you expand on that? Typical coding schemes use redundancy to be able to detect failures. I'm no info theory expert but I presume there

> had no real cost. Can you expand on that? Typical coding schemes use redundancy to be able to detect failures. I'm no info theory expert but I presume there's always a cost. And if you can design a smart enough algorithm you can balance the cost with the actual likelihood of failure to find some kind of equilibrium. Of course the algorithm development has its own cost (NRE, time-to-market). It's not clear whether you're talking about modern computers or dawn-of-PCs when you say "should have." It might be smaller cost now but back in the day it would have been mega expensive.