Well, you know, it’s interesting. Back when I started working on coding, it was voice coding, and 16 kb/s was “way too much” for some applications. Things changed, transmission methods improved, and now we needed 9.6kb/s for speech. Then 7.2 then 4.8 kb/s, even as the transmission rate improved and improved more.
At the same time, the argument was “coding will cease being necessary”. I kind of think that myself, but it’s been since 1976 and CODING IS STILL NECESSARY and some of the rates are LOWER than they were then. The price of transmission has dropped by so much (2000 for 300 bits/second modem, plus long distance charges) to what? What does it even cost to send 300 bits/second? Is there anything within 5 orders of magnitude even still in existence?
The same as memory. First processor I built required 32 “1×1024” memory chips. They were blisteringly fast, 190 nanoseconds. Almost 5MHz. Yeah. And they were, for the time, blistering fast.
Now? Could anyone provide a 1k memory chip? 🙂
But coded speech and music seem to be expanding. But I do wish it was all lossless coding now.