A world without the internet?

[kspence92]

Just a random thought I had. What it the internet had never been invented? As far as I know the internet began with the creation of the ARPNET in the 60s for university and military projects I believe (I may be wrong?)

What if nobody had ever thought of creating anything along the lines of the internet? How would things be different today?

 

[Devvy]

I would argue that the Internet as a concept has existed for decades (if not a few centuries), and it's damn hard to avoid the concept evolving into the internet as we know it today.

For centuries, you've had people transmitting messages by signs over long distances, whether that is fire signals, flags or whatever.

With electricity, this evolved into sending the same messages by electric telegraph. By this point, it's already a primitive internet; messages are essentially coded in to 1s and 0s, and transmitted along an electrical wire to the next hub. The hub reads the message, and transmits it along the next cable to the next hub until it reaches it's destination. This is already a de facto packet switched network; essentially exactly how the internet works (although TCP/IP would bring much better addressing to allow quicker routing of messages from A to B).

The internet as we see it is best eliminated by removing computers from the timeline, as the internet itself is merely a communication mechanism, the latest form of a concept that has existed for ages.

 

[Cahaya Purnama]

NO AH.COM, LISTVERSE.COM, CRACKED.COM, FANFICTION.NET, TOFUGU.COM

this world sucks

 

[Pericles]

Al Gore wins because of no 'I invented the internet'

 

[Pseudo]

I imagine that the twelfth episode of South Park's sixteenth season would be very different.

 

[Mike D]

Young boys would still rely on finding soggy, torn up copies of Fiesta or Razzle under hedges for their first glimpse of a lady's bits.

 

[Cahaya Purnama]

Young boys would still rely on finding soggy, torn up copies of Fiesta or Razzle under hedges for their first glimpse of a lady's bits.

they do that?

 

[Mike D]

they do that?

Finding your first second hand bongo mag under a bush in the park and finding out that *that* was what none of the girls in your year would let you near was a major rite of passage when I was a young 'un in the early 90s.

 

[Mike D]

And when you think about it, it actually is a pretty major change in our lives that's come about from the internet - the exposure to sex/porn that even some pre-teens now get because of the internet is a massive shift in the way our society works even over when I was a teenager growing up in the 90s.

I'd be very surprised if there's been many major changes in societal norms that have about quicker than those related to the easy access to porn on the internet.