Yes, but as the numbers advance from "the remote desktop has like 128KB" and "the remote desktop can chew through gigabytes without much stress", the delta between O(n) and O(n^2) opens up a lot more. It is perhaps a bit counterintuitive, but as systems grow in capability that delta grows.
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Yes, but as the numbers advance from "the remote desktop has like 128KB" and "the remote desktop can chew through gigabytes without much stress", the delta between O(n) and O(n^2) opens up a lot more. It is perhaps a bit counterintuitive, but as systems grow in capability that delta grows.
Server capacity has grown along with it if not even faster.
A server in 1990 had total storage and RAM roughly comparable to a low-end mobile phone today.
Server capacities have not grown at O(n^2) on data sets.
Computational complexity classes are not intuitive things. You can't just go "oh, that's much bigger than that so it must that many times better".