10 Mbps was fine for, frankly, just about anything under 100 MB. And since 100 Mbps hubs were rare beasts, most being switches, they stayed a lot more expensive

10 Mbps was fine for, frankly, just about anything under 100 MB. And since 100 Mbps hubs were rare beasts, most being switches, they stayed a lot more expensive for a long time. Hell, my first home network was 10 Mbps on thinnet because it was so much cheaper than a 10 Mbps hub, and that was ca. 1997. I'd had 100 Mbps available in the dorms the year before, but you were looking at $250 for 100 vs $40 or less for 10 - which, in college student dollars, is a lot. When we had hard drives that barely topped 1 GB, which could be copied in under 17 minutes even on 10 Mbps, there just wasn't a huge incentive to upgrade speed. But once 100 made sense for homes - supporting 802.11g - the price of switches fell rapidly because it was no longer just businesses buying them. And so 1 Gbps fell more quickly, because the background hardware was getting cheaper. My 1998 computer with 100 Mbps and a 6.4 GB drive got used a few times as the piracy data exfiltration machine because it could pull down the 5 GB of stuff we'd accumulated so much faster, then plug it up to the three-apartment network we had set up and let everyone pull it to their own machines on the 10 Mbps we had there. Our outgoing connection was a Linux box on a 56k connection shared among six of us; it's not like 10 Mbps slowed any of that down.