upvote
I mostly agree with you, but you couldn't have have meaningful live videochat between continents in 2000.
reply
CU-SeeMe worked pretty well in 1995 if you had access to a half decent Internet connection, which admittedly most people didn’t.

For well funded organisations, ISDN video conferencing facilities were reasonably common.

reply
Verizon in NYC was trying to make ISDN happen in the home in the mid 90's. I had it. The hard part was getting an ISP that supported SLIP.
reply
CuSeeMe certainly was being used before 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe

reply
That took until skype in 2003 I guess. The idea is pretty old though and people were trying for it for a while from different angles.
reply
Maybe not between continents but we had meaningful live video chat in 1968
reply
>all this hand wringing on performance, graphics, quality quality quality, has just resulted in basically same stuff as what I was doing with my computer in 2000 but with enormous resource use in compariso

Mordern GPUs are streaming multiprocessors. Complaining that GPUs use a ton of resources is like complaining that a firehose uses a ton of water. Maximum data throughput is the point!

>But that isn't what any of that is. Same old. And the effort spent, the resources, the energy. All for more polygons on Lara Croft

There are MANY novel games being released every year. It's up to you to find them.

reply