Internet doesn't become mainstream?

trurle

Banned
Delaying - quite easy. Make original internet a top secret for military-only usage. Ultimately, internet-like competing networks will appear and proliferate, likely from the gaming community, but it will take several decades of "wars of standards" and relative neglect before something resembling a global network can be established. Imagine a hundred of competing FidoNet entities.
 
Delaying - quite easy. Make original internet a top secret for military-only usage. Ultimately, internet-like competing networks will appear and proliferate, likely from the gaming community, but it will take several decades of "wars of standards" and relative neglect before something resembling a global network can be established. Imagine a hundred of competing FidoNet entities.

So, just like OTL, with BBS, UseNet, FidoNet, AOL, BIX, Compuserve, Prodigy, Delphi.....
 
If personal computers stayed in the $10,000 range, however, the OTL events that made them commercially viable would be hard to stop. However, if PCs stayed expensive, it would make the internet more of a niche product of the upper class.
 
Wouldn't colleges be using it anyway? I swear several colleges were on the rudimentary net in the 70s (Nolan Bushnell used it at the University of Utah). So likely a college/government service.
 
If personal computers stayed in the $10,000 range, however, the OTL events that made them commercially viable would be hard to stop. However, if PCs stayed expensive, it would make the internet more of a niche product of the upper class.

There is no way for that to happen once the 6502, 8080 and Z80 processors are released.
 

trurle

Banned
while not as nice as TCP/IP, the Internet could have still gone on with the X.25 protocol that many in those I listed used, for a world spanning network.
Yes, you may be correct. What`s why i say "delay internet" instead of "prevention of internet creation". The exact amount of delay caused by war of standards and inconvenient connection schemes is debatable though.
 
When the Internet came in, only colleges were (effectively) connected to it, and long distance phone calls were insanely expensive.
Shuffling data from one side of the country to another would have been so expensive that no one would do it.
The advent of fiber optic cable everywhere made long distance data almost free.
And even when transmission prices came down, trying to browse the web with dial up modems meant that graphics had to be pretty limited.

So....
Have AT&T keep their monopoly in the US, slowing the drop in communications costs and slowing the innovation in modem speeds (maybe never get to 9600 baud), have Darpanet never go commercial.

Everyone has to connect through a Compuserve/AOL/whomever connexion within their local dialing area.
Keep modem speeds down to 2400 baud...

Yeah, it would be pretty easy to keep the wide-open Internet we know from happening. Something based on France's Minitel, say, might be the path, instead of the Web, and you could have large pools of semi-proprietary (again, Compuserve, AOL, others) nets that didn't play perfectly well with each other.

For someone who's lived through it, the change has been incredible, and I suspect the openness of today's system is a middling low probability.
 
This is something I ponder in the long term butterflies file as I tinker with ATL Great War outcomes. My assumption is that electronics and computer sciences generally evolve much alike with the odd slow down or misstep, but things develop in a more proprietary manner. I think this would occur because more development is commercially done with the obvious military projects in their niches. The European countries have state-owned telephone networks and the USA is dominated by the AT&T monopoly. So I would envision more evolution commercially like the French Minitel system inside each country but also different commercial offerings too so you get a patchwork of systems, standards and protocols. Obviously I think someone develops interfaces so they can talk across systems and in that way the "web" is emulated. I think an Intranet (from Darpanet to Internet) is developed to facilitate communications for university, government and corporate uses, perhaps here we get more than one evolving at the same time, the American one we know and say a German one linking its research centers or one in the UK or all the above. I think the big change will be how open these are. If they are state owned or commercially owned outright then there is more pressure and opportunity to control content. I do not presuppose it is censorship but as we know a corporate mindset will avoid controversy and self censor in many cases. If the "web" stays commercially driven, filled with academic and educational content, more public radio than pirate radio, it might fall far short of being a pervasive household technology.
 
You could have lots of private/proprietary networks - Bloomberg TV for example. These could develop so that however developed you get, you only get onto YOUR network and not in a general cross-flow of networks.
 
You could have lots of private/proprietary networks - Bloomberg TV for example. These could develop so that however developed you get, you only get onto YOUR network and not in a general cross-flow of networks.

Yet customers were clamoring for interconnection.

Thus 'Eternal September' in 1993, with AOL getting access to USENET
 
Thus 'Eternal September' in 1993, with AOL getting access to USENET

I'll explain this for the benefit of those who don't know. When the Internet was limited to colleges and universities, USENET would be bogged down every September by the incoming class of freshmen, who would need to have the basic rules of the network explained to them. In September, 1993, AOL gave its users access to USENET, and the stream of new users (which was once only a yearly occurrence) was never-ending.
 
my high school had a dedicated line to Rice University / NASA (they shared resources) in 1979, so access goes back a long way.

You want to really delay the widespread use of the internet... make porn hard to get
 

Ak-84

Banned
I think the modern Internet is an inevitability. It could ave been delayed for 5-10 years but not indefinitely. Remember every middling size military and banking system has its own version by the mid 1970's. Once you have Computers, you want them to talk to each other and the progression is irresistible

What was not inevitable was the proliferation of mobile phones.
 
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