Around the turn of the century, in a network the size of Europe, we had OOB comms to the core routers via ISDN/POTS. We experimented with mobile phones in the racks as well, much to the chagrin of the old telco guys running the PoPs.
Try running a full node for ETH on a beefy desktop and you quickly run into the limits. There is also the maximimum speed of light, which will make scaling interplanetary a bit difficult on high speed block times.
I have automated a few installations of historical operating systems in qemu/bochs with the help of travis-ci. Due to all the ANSI output the job logs are unreadable. To see what's going on in the emulator I use an asciinema rec/asciinema upload in the build scripts. This helped me out a lot.
That send to be fully intentional - it's more challenging to solve the problems with a limited subset of commands and inputs (e.g. you're only allowed to grep for specific patterns)
