I think an older probe also took the first digital pictures before bitmap images were a thing, they could digitise it at the probe end but had to colour in the pixels on a piece of paper at the other end if I recall correctly. Point is, NASA had to solve a lot of digital communication problems long before they had established terrestrial solutions or before computers were even capable of solving the whole problem on their own.

Then again, even if the timing was reversed, a lot of terrestrial communication protocols have no chance of working properly at the ranges required for space exploration - something I've been meaning to look into is the redundancy requirements over those long distances, since re-transmission is so costly in terms of latency that it probably makes sense to pack as much redundancy into the signal as possible, we already do this with terrestrial communication in the form of various codes, but there's a finer balance between increased bandwidth and the relatively low latency cost of re-transmission in the case of unrecoverable sequences... I'm guessing you want a far lower probability of loss for a 43 hour round trip.