AHC: Much Earlier Internet

[John Fredrick Parker]

OK, fair warning, I am very unfamiliar with what I am fairly certain would be the necessary computer science to fully grasp this. My challenge, nonetheless:

What I am looking for is, by 1973, for there to exist the equivalent of the World Wide Web, for the first search engine to be released that year (or thereabouts, or earlier if even possible).

I realize this could mean a much earlier PoD -- to start with, microprocessors, which would have to (I'd think) be in wide use were created 1971 OTL; likely this would have to be pushed back as well.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

Some other thoughts -- would I need to go back to, say, the 1950's on this? I'd read in 1950 there were two electronic computers in the US, and in 1955 there were 240(!), then some several thousand in 1960. Would this explosion of computers need to be bigger or come sooner for the outcome I described to be plausible?

Another thought is that these electronic computers are based on the models developed in the 1940's, themselves developed (AIUI) from mathematical ideas that came out in the late 1930's (the Turning Machine, Lambada calculus, etc). Do they need to be developed earlier?

(BTW, both of these ideas I got just reading a Wiki page on Computer History -- don't read much into my understanding, assuming I even got the ideas right...)

 

[NKVD]

Protip: don't bump an hour after your last post.

 

[Gerry10]

1. Konrad Zuse builds his Z3 electric and not mechanic.
2. The race to the moon stars with the Berlin embargo - this would lead to the invention of the microprocessor.

This should be enough to get the WWW up and running in the late 60ies.
However, I don't think that the general population would be into computers the way they were at the beginning of the 80ies.
I don't see hippies buying computers "from the man"

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

First off, thanks for the response.

1. Konrad Zuse builds his Z3 electric and not mechanic.

Sounds good, like a 5 year head start -- seeing as ENIAC was finished 1946.

2. The race to the moon stars with the Berlin embargo - this would lead to the invention of the microprocessor.

Sounds like there's potential overlap with this thread.

However, I don't think that the general population would be into computers the way they were at the beginning of the 80ies.
I don't see hippies buying computers "from the man"

I don't know, AIUI the 60's were pretty into consumption...

 

[f1b0nacc1]

DARPA

Keep in mind that the original purpose behind the Internet was to have a survivable communications system operational after a nuclear war. The Internet (as opposed to the WWW) was actually in operation in a very limited way by the late 1960s. It wasn't called the Internet at the time (look up ARPANET, or later DARPANET), but it provided the foundation of the WWW.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

OK, so maybe what's needed is for microcomputers to come into fashion a decade or so earlier, then someone finds a way to tap them into ARPANET near the beginning of its foundation (it went transcontinental OTL in 1970, which would be a good time to set a a WWW in TTL for OP purposes...)

Of course, that likely still means an early intro for microprocessors; only question now is how late could it plausibly come?

 

[G.Fieendish]

1. Konrad Zuse builds his Z3 electric and not mechanic.
2. The race to the moon stars with the Berlin embargo - this would lead to the invention of the microprocessor.

This should be enough to get the WWW up and running in the late 60ies.
However, I don't think that the general population would be into computers the way they were at the beginning of the 80ies.
I don't see hippies buying computers "from the man"

Hmm...
What would happen if Konrad Zuse, went to Manchester University in the late 40's & worked on the SSEM (Small Scale Experimental Machine)'s successor...?
Baby as it was nicknamed, was the first computer with a storable memory system, in the form of a electron tube memory (effectively it was the first system to have RAM memory)...
As for hippies buying "from the man", well how about a coffee shop, or in the case I'm about to mention, a tea house...?
The tea house chain Lyon's, had a subsiduary division that delevoped with Ferranti, a series of mainframes under the title LEO (Lyons Electric Office), ranging from Marks 1 to 4, that until the introduction of the IBM System 360 range in the mid 60's, was the dominant system used in the U.K...

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

Regarding a PoD in the 1940's, it sounds like the real noticeable butterflies wouldn't really set in until the 1950's, which was when the explosion of electronic computers began OTL.

 

[Dan Reilly The Great]

well, in order to get an internet that resembles that of OTL, you need computers to become somewhat common in households. And in order for that to happen they have to be affordable, and people have to want to buy them. I think the best bet you can get is to have affordable computers that are good at word processing and book keeping, and then people will start buying them, then once there are enough home computers out there the internet will come on the scene. I don't think the internet as we know it can come into being until after home computers become prevalent.

I would say if you can get the space race kicked off early, or perhaps have the Russians and Americans both get really focused on cryptanalysis, you can accelerate the development of computer technology enough to get the advent of the home computer a decade early.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

More delicious overlap with this thread.

Seems to me if you could have a space race underway in the 1930's, and maybe move up the mathematics just a few years, you'd have the basic layout of a computing machine and a major state incentive to develop them a lot earlier than OTL.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

To get anything like OTL's Internet, you need dirt cheap telecoms. Which, in turn, probably means fibre optics. Which aren't going to happen a whole lot sooner, due to the required tech (super-ultra-hyper-transparent glass, semi-conductor lasers, etc)

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

Could the growing software demand of a growing Internet accelerate hardware development?

(I think that sentence is right...)

 

[NothingNow]

Could the growing software demand of a growing Internet accelerate hardware development?

(I think that sentence is right...)

Not really. Moore's law is generally fairly consistent, but you would See tricks for saving memory and processing power that might not have shown up IOTL.

 

[Mr Qwerty]

To get anything like OTL's Internet, you need dirt cheap telecoms. Which, in turn, probably means fibre optics. Which aren't going to happen a whole lot sooner, due to the required tech (super-ultra-hyper-transparent glass, semi-conductor lasers, etc)

The text-based internet using modems and phone lines (which you might not be old enough to remember) ought to satisfy the challenge. You could be right that technologies needed for the multimedia WWW would be longer in coming, resulting in the net being text-based longer.

 

[Mark E.]

To get anything like OTL's Internet, you need dirt cheap telecoms. Which, in turn, probably means fibre optics. Which aren't going to happen a whole lot sooner, due to the required tech (super-ultra-hyper-transparent glass, semi-conductor lasers, etc)

The OTL Internet survived as a text-oriented dial-up forum through most of the nineties, and for some, past 2000. In the mid-seventies OTL, you had telephone cradles that allowed remote terminals to communicate with mainframe computers. In the U.S., you could not plug a user-owned telephone into the phone system until the eighties.

There are some bits of technology from the 1930's that could have been put into use faster. One is the transistor, along with other solid state electronics. It sat on the shelf for quite some time because vacuum tubes were considered heartier and more reliable. Another is the tape recorder, invented in Germany in the thirties. It stayed in Germany until Allies reverse-engineered German machines around 1945-1948. Magnetic recording means data storage and if the technology breaks out in the thirties, you have a good 10-12 year bump in electronics in general. More electronics means greater interest in energy-saving transistors, etc.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

The text-based internet using modems and phone lines (which you might not be old enough to remember) ought to satisfy the challenge. You could be right that technologies needed for the multimedia WWW would be longer in coming, resulting in the net being text-based longer.

The OTL Internet survived as a text-oriented dial-up forum through most of the nineties, and for some, past 2000. In the mid-seventies OTL, you had telephone cradles that allowed remote terminals to communicate with mainframe computers. In the U.S., you could not plug a user-owned telephone into the phone system until the eighties.

There are some bits of technology from the 1930's that could have been put into use faster. One is the transistor, along with other solid state electronics. It sat on the shelf for quite some time because vacuum tubes were considered heartier and more reliable. Another is the tape recorder, invented in Germany in the thirties. It stayed in Germany until Allies reverse-engineered German machines around 1945-1948. Magnetic recording means data storage and if the technology breaks out in the thirties, you have a good 10-12 year bump in electronics in general. More electronics means greater interest in energy-saving transistors, etc.

Heh. I'm old enough I predate the Internet.

Dialing into local BBSs can be done with copper wire. Having BBSs exchange packets at midnight during low rates can be done. (à la Fidonet, I think it was called)

But having instantaneous communication across the continent, let alone the world needs fiber.

When the Internet first became available in Canada, say, it was only available to Universities and the trunk/toll costs were partly covered by research grants and partly because the Telecoms companies had started to implement fiber and gave the internet backbones big breaks.

Without fiber you're going to have to pay an arm and a leg for anything more than a short text message across the country.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

Well, as it happens, fiberoptic cables were first developed OTL in 1970, the same year as ARAPNET.

A few posts ago, I mentioned that if microcomputers were more common by 1970, more people might plug in from the beginning -- maybe instead, there's a demand, and someone notices that fiber would be perfect for meeting the demand.

In this scenario, it's not crazy to think we could have a web, complete with rudimentary search engines, by, say, 1976.

 

[Chuck Mandus]

Heh. I'm old enough I predate the Internet.

Dialing into local BBSs can be done with copper wire. Having BBSs exchange packets at midnight during low rates can be done. (à la Fidonet, I think it was called)

But having instantaneous communication across the continent, let alone the world needs fiber.

When the Internet first became available in Canada, say, it was only available to Universities and the trunk/toll costs were partly covered by research grants and partly because the Telecoms companies had started to implement fiber and gave the internet backbones big breaks.

Without fiber you're going to have to pay an arm and a leg for anything more than a short text message across the country.

I remember Fidonet too, they had a "National Mail Hour" late at night. I remember using my Apple //e to access it at 300/1200 baud, later I got a '486SX with 2400 baud. I guess you can have an earlier, text based, internet sometime in the early 1980's but earlier than that is really pushing it unless you have a major POD or two at least. In some ways, I miss Fidonet.