Internet doesn't become mainstream?

Floppy diskettes first.

I'm old enough to have interchanged data by
(a) Printed out hardcopy, that you would enter in yourself
(b) Papertape or Punchcards
This was my first Terminal, the ASR-33
M33-ASR-16a.jpg


But you had to toggle in the bootloader by hand, by flipping switches on the Minicomputer front panel
8f_panel.jpg

because there was no ROM BIOS as we know it today, you had to load enough so the CPU could access the serial port, to run the paper tape reader to load the rest of the OS into memory.

Cool thing about Core Memory, the memory would hold state when the power was off, so if you got lucky, you could point to a memory address at start and load that way from a cold start, but that wasn't always reliable

Once everything going you would use the modem to connect at an awesome 110 baud to another PDP network for long distance data transfers
 
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

Too late.

1957, IBM AN/FSQ-7 used by the USAF SAGE network for air defense

It could draw pinups besides tracking Soviet bombers
sage_pinup-thumb-615x500-111521.jpg
 
Floppy diskettes first.

I remember doing that back in the day. The cautious ran the floppies across a virus detection program before booting their OS & allowing the OS and apps to access the disk. Infected floppies were the terror of the overly cautious and paranoid. Who knew where that thing had been before it went into your slot :O

Mailing floppies was another adventure. Complaints about damaged disks from the USPS of the day were not uncommon. Copying & loaning floppies was another adventure. Like college text books it was a decision. "I dunno if I have time to copy that for you tonight. It will interfere with: (pick one) Studying, Writing a Term Paper, the Night Job, Scoring With a Chick. "

Anyone here remember the BIG disks? What were those, eight inch? What about PC that used casette tapes? Damm its been a while.
 
Anyone here remember the BIG disks? What were those, eight inch? What about PC that used casette tapes? Damm its been a while.

the big 8" Shugart Floppys had a pattern printed on the spindle, so when you were adjusting the drive speed(that you had to do often) 60 cycle light flicker would give you the right strobe effect. If speed was off, you could tell real fast and tweak a Bourne multiturn pot to adjust away.
Here's a pic of a smaller 5 1/4 setup the same way
tandon-360-kb-5.25-fh-floppy-drive-tm101-3-23.11__76946.1489914618.jpg


Radioshack popularized the cassette deck for storage, but I hacked to use a Sony Reel to Reel for more reliable loads on the TRS-80 Model I

This example is with a slightly older Altair going off a Reel like I used to

Best was the Atari 400/800. Used the stereo where one track was data, the other music, so you didn't have to listen to the bleeps and bloops
 
Anyone here remember the BIG disks? What were those, eight inch? What about PC that used casette tapes? Damm its been a while.
Big floppies:
My MSc thesis was written on a wordprocessor on a PDP-11 and stored on 8" floppies. 10$/disc. in 1980. Chunk of change that was.

Didn't the TRS-80 (Trash80) and Coleco Adam (??) use cassettes?
 
Big floppies:
My MSc thesis was written on a wordprocessor on a PDP-11 and stored on 8" floppies. 10$/disc. in 1980. Chunk of change that was.

Didn't the TRS-80 (Trash80) and Coleco Adam (??) use cassettes?

I remember getting an 5 1/4" Atari 810 drive on clearance at Sears for $99, that was a steal in 1981, as they normally sold for around $400

Cassette was the main means of program loading, and was very unreliable. Had to have the volume just right so the 500 baud data would be 'heard' correctly on the Model I. Model III could 'Hear' faster 1500 baud tapes, for reduced load times
 
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I still have my old AppleIIe in storage. It still worked the last time I accessed some old documents for a customer. Have not been able to scrap the thing out of nostalgia. Loved the monochrome green on black screen as it was very eye friendly & fatigue was long in coming on.
 
I still have my old AppleIIe in storage. It still worked the last time I accessed some old documents for a customer. Have not been able to scrap the thing out of nostalgia. Loved the monochrome green on black screen as it was very eye friendly & fatigue was long in coming on.
my first computer (at school) was a Tandy (radio shack in us) TRS-80, at home a BBC-B, which later got traded in for an Atari 1040ST (that i still have in storage)
 

Archibald

Banned
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.

I grew up with Minitel as the ultimate hype. That was only twenty years ago. Now it is entirely gone and buried.
 

Archibald

Banned
Floppy disks, let's talk about them.

It is hard to figure in these days on instant downloading how long could it take to download something on a freakkin' floppy disk.
I started dowloading big NASA pdf from the NTRS in 2002-2003 and got my first USB disk only by 2005. NASA pdf can be enormous and I had a collection of floppy disks, each one with a couple of Pdf (best case scenario).

I remember the first time my elder sister bought an USB disk. I joked it sounded like ESB, the French accronym for Mad Cow Disease or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE = ESB > USB, you get the point ?)


Listen "Greased lightning" at 2:00. The sound (up to 2:09) is exactly similar to a floppy disk painstaking downloading.
That blew my mind back then, it was one of my favorite running joke.
"Hey listen, the floppy disk sounds like that Grease song"

tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik. (pom pom) tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik (pom pom)

I'm laughing like an idiot just typing this post.
 
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Archibald

Banned
the TRS-80 (Trash80)

Laughed loud. I remember the TO7 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_TO7/70
In 1985 the Mitterrand government started a massive plan to get Computers into French schools.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_informatique_pour_tous

Except they bought an obsolete model that cost an arm and a leg and were never really replaced, at least not until a decade later. When I was in high school (around 1994) some of these relics were still there.

My father salvaged one of them when they were phased out of Public Services.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMT_Goupil
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=537
Goupil is a famous French fox from the Middle Ages, and I felt it was a stupid name for a computer.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/goupil

This was, what, 1993 ? My father teached me and my sister BASIC with this book https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games

Meanwhile my sister was in full Ace of Base mode (hey, that was 1994). Microsoft BASIC and Ace of Base. What a weird combination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_of_Base (dear god how I hated this pop group, and still hate them).
 
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Ak-84

Banned
Why wouldn't mobile phones proliferate? I have no idea as to why they wouldn't.
You require Governments in mid level economies in Asia to make the infrastructure investments for networks and provide incentives that they did in OTL. For many years (at least until the early and mid 2000's) Telecommunications was a money loser for Governments. Places like India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, its certainly possible that the Governments don't do the above and or cut back. World Bank famously refused to extend loans for such works saying in essence "poor people should know their place". Benazir Bhutto was lampooned for listing bringing of mobile phones to the country as one of her achievements, while alleged corruption in such deals was one of the accusations against Suharto.
Governments in both India and Pakistan came to power having campaigned to stop this spending only to turn around and say "what I never said that" once in office.
 
You require Governments in mid level economies in Asia to make the infrastructure investments for networks and provide incentives that they did in OTL.
Why is this necessary? The major standards were developed in Europe and America. Reduced cellphone usage in poorer countries would definitely slow down pick-up but cell phones were still popular in richer nations like Japan and the United States.
Also do you have any sources? I haven't been able to find information corroborating your claims. The big issue seemed to be privatisation versus government control at least in India and in regards to World Bank funding. I'm using Wikipedia as a source, though, so more reliable sites would be welcomed.
 

Ak-84

Banned
I'll share the sources later, as they are a re from multiple places, , altbough read the privitisation v Gov control, as it does contains some very pertinent issues, esepcially considering the fact that deregulation and breaking of State monopolies was the first step to infrastruture investments, basically the large phone companies were broken up, sold to investors who were then given tax breaks, subsidies and sometimes Government backed loans. A very politically fraught process.

Re the first, there are 5 billion mobiles in the world today. 4/5 are outside "rich" countries. Rich countries just don't have the numbers and the critical mass needed. The large mobile sets makers will not have the monies and the incentive to develop sets at the rate that they did. (One of the reasons Apple has struggled recently has been its reluctance to enter markets outside its comfort zone, unlike Samsung and Huaweii who'll show up anyplace.). Seconldy, mobiles went from "rich boys toys" to "middle class accessories" to "universal" in stages. The first two had happened and were happening in rich countries respectivley. Middle and poorer countries had also seen the first stage happen. What is often forgotten is how quickly stage 3 occured, Bacially, in the late 1990's mobile were till the accessory of the affuluent, in most places. In the early 2000's everyone had them*.

Absent that, I doubt mobile phones would have become cheap enough to ensure universal adoption in rich countries, never mind world wide as happened in OTL, in essence like pagers. IIRC the estimates for maximum globla market was 500 million to 750 million connections and that was seen as being very optimistic.
 
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