My comment was actually a self quote from a talk I gave about PS4 hacking where I described that PCIe will happily run over bare soldered wires without much care for signal integrity, at least over short distances (unlike what you might expect of a high-speed bus like that) :)

Not literally wet string, but definitely low tech. ADSL is special though, not many technologies can literally run over wet string :-)

Well, then we could make it a scale of what the worst transmission medium is that two pieces of hardware can (sort of) communicate across :)

off topic, but I commend the article if just for the conclusion