What if, for what ever reason the internet did not exist there may be some kind of governmental mass info network, but as we know the Internet, it does not exist.
Long term effects of No Internet
- Thread starter Mister Abbadon
- Start date
I guess without eBay, I would have some of the hard-to-find books and games (not to mention no 3DO or Sega CD... or a pair of Atari Jaguars, which I have no working AC adaptor for 
). I'd also have less books and DVDs, since I order most of them too. Oh, and let's not forget what the total lack of iTunes would do for the radio and CD industries.
). I'd also have less books and DVDs, since I order most of them too. Oh, and let's not forget what the total lack of iTunes would do for the radio and CD industries.
If there is no internet, then society will go horribly wrong.
I mean, there is absolutely no way to tell what Western culture will be like. The impact of the internet has been so massive, despite the brief time it's been here, that a world without it will not resemble ours at all.
I mean, there is absolutely no way to tell what Western culture will be like. The impact of the internet has been so massive, despite the brief time it's been here, that a world without it will not resemble ours at all.
King Thomas
Banned
Without an Internet, I remain a virgin with no friends.All my friends since I was 11 years old have been Internet ones, both my exs I met on the Internet.
Certain products no longer produced will have higher prices for collectors. With the internet, certain rarer antiques have proven to be more prominent than once thought, and certainly easier to find. Thus, their prices have dropped.
I'm not just talking about old vases or any stereotype of antiques but anything old and no longer produced like old video games and so forth.
I'm not just talking about old vases or any stereotype of antiques but anything old and no longer produced like old video games and so forth.
Vivisfugue
Banned
The media industries are where the internet exercises its most visible influence. In the US at least, newspapers have been consolidating or going out of business for the past decade. A similar dynamic exists in the music industry (legal and illegal file sharing). In the wider economy, the internet permits the rapid transmission of detailed engineering specs from West to East, allowing a lot of manufacturing that in an internet-free world would be done in the US or Europe (or at least in Mexican maquiladoras) in Asia. So I guess in an internet-less world would broadly have a richer West, a poorer Asia, and a viable newspaper and music industry.
No internet? The effects would be extremely profound. We're looking at a conceptual gulf as vast as that between "No Printing" and "Printing" and a gulf that has been created much, much faster.
The system, it's technologies, and the behaviors it spawned are all such a part of the subconscious assumptions of daily living that young adults can't even begin to grasp the idea of life without an internet. For example, I play war games as a hobby, mostly miniatures, and the younger members of the clubs I visit can't even comprehend why the older members waited for mailed catalogs, drove hours to visit certain stores, and weren't aware of certain rule sets until years after their release. They blithely assume we could have simply looked it all up on line in 1976 or 1980 or even 1990. They get confused when we talk about play-by-mail games lasting almost a year because they assume play-by-mail means play-by-email.
We need to look at very fundamental differences here:
The system, it's technologies, and the behaviors it spawned are all such a part of the subconscious assumptions of daily living that young adults can't even begin to grasp the idea of life without an internet. For example, I play war games as a hobby, mostly miniatures, and the younger members of the clubs I visit can't even comprehend why the older members waited for mailed catalogs, drove hours to visit certain stores, and weren't aware of certain rule sets until years after their release. They blithely assume we could have simply looked it all up on line in 1976 or 1980 or even 1990. They get confused when we talk about play-by-mail games lasting almost a year because they assume play-by-mail means play-by-email.
We need to look at very fundamental differences here:
- Much more "snail" mail and more reliance on "snail" mail.
- Fewer UPS/Fedex deliveries though because of no on-line shopping.
- Many more newspapers with much higher circulations
- Many more magazines, both general and interest specific, with much higher circulations.
- Higher overall TV ratings for standard networks which might slow the growth of special interest channels.
- Fewer niche radio broadcasts, although satellite radio might prevent this
- More retail outlets. Big boost in book, music, DVD, etc. stores.
- Far less pornography, far less access to pornography, and far, far less niche pornographic material being produced.
- A more uniform "culture" or, perhaps more accurately, subcultures less easily noticed.
- Far slower rate of pop culture "churn" with a higher bar to entry, those fads which can gain traction take longer to develop and fade.
- Return to the 24 hour news cycle of TV and radio.
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*sigh*
All these youngsters thinking that the internet is the only way to access material on other computers...
BBS systems worked quite well, expecially in countries with flat rate diallup, and it wouldnt take a lot to implement the idea of hyperlinks, which gives you something that ends up acting rather like the internet.
You are going to get something looking and acting rather like the net even if the original system never goes public. The technology was there at the time, something along those lines was going to happen. Hopefully something with less spam....
All these youngsters thinking that the internet is the only way to access material on other computers...
BBS systems worked quite well, expecially in countries with flat rate diallup, and it wouldnt take a lot to implement the idea of hyperlinks, which gives you something that ends up acting rather like the internet.
You are going to get something looking and acting rather like the net even if the original system never goes public. The technology was there at the time, something along those lines was going to happen. Hopefully something with less spam....
This is an example of how fundamental the internet has become to our way of thinking. You have trouble either thinking or remembering what a "No Internet" world would be or was like so you're looking at the OP's question backwards.
Because the internet is so useful and so much a part of our daily life, you're assuming that the scattered BBS systems of the 1980s maintained by various phreaks and other computer/communications geeks would naturally and automatically morph into a slightly different version of the internet.
I don't think that's something we should assume. The explosive growth in the numbers of personal computers begin used depended on very many factors and any internet requires a huge numbers of consumers using personal computers.
If it never goes public it won't be the internet we know now and that is what the OP's question was all about. Limited "nets" of BBSs serving the needs of various hobbyists wouldn't be the internet, an internet maybe, but with nothing like the effects we've seen in the last few decades.
That "internet" would more resemble ham radio than anything else.
I'd been dealing with company and industry infranet systems since the late 1970s, owned a Kaypro II CP/M machine in '82, I even was part of the BBS culture of the late 1980s via Sears as an "ISP", but nothing I saw or used ever suggested what we have now.
What we have now was inconceivable 25 years ago.
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No internet means no social media sites or blogging! That means people won't be allowed to post surveys about themselves or voice their idiotic opinions for the entire world to see. It means we have to drive to the library instead of going on EBSCO or even Googling a topic.
DAMN THIS NON-INTERNET WORLD!!!!!
DAMN IT TO HELL!!!!!!!!
DAMN THIS NON-INTERNET WORLD!!!!!
DAMN IT TO HELL!!!!!!!!
I know what you mean could you see the young people of today playing the monster games that came out in the late 1970's . Or them waiting on the Europa Game's System to finish which started in 1974 and still is not finished .
Not in the slightest, and dont try condescending to people who have rather longer experience than you do. I've been in IT and comms since the early 70's, and I built my first PC in 1978.
In the UK in the 80's (at this point the internet wasnt available for private users), the BBS systems were slowly but steadily broadening what they could do (think about this - just what is it your looking at right now), and linking to other sites.
Remote access of systems was increasing, again slowly, and again with connectivity slowly improving.
These things were basically submerged when the internet became available around the beginning of the 90's - no WWW at this point, it was all text, and lots of IP addresses, and very little hyperlnking. In fact, the only big difference was the way you dialled up.
So yes, something resembling the internet would have hapenned even if arpanet had died stillborne. The path taken would have been different, but the wish to connect more easily to the available sites would have driven the technology in the same direction.
Now I understand that in the USA public access to the net was available earlier, so its quite possible that the development of BBS and remote access were aborted at an earlier stage. In the UK, it wasn't until Demon set up as an ISP with diallup access that anyone outside of the university and a few companies could get onto it.
I assume you mean intranet company services, btw
These were never terribly popular in the UK, first because of the available modem speed (and size...I remember one of th eearly ICL makes, it rather resembled a small tank...
. Once modem speeds got faster, they still weren't used much, companies simlpy didnt find that the available tech filled a need.What I think you are forgetting is the growing use of computers by the end of the 80's, and the interest in accessing stuff on other peoples machines and talking to them. Those drivers are only going to go away if you abort the PC revolution of the late 70's early 80's, otherwise something that has the same sort of functionality of the internet will come into existence (although it woulkd certainly differ in detail on how it worked). Its the old story of an invention whos time has come - do something to abort it, and something similar will appear in its place.
But you are assuming nothing fills that need for faster communications.
I too played wargames and pbm games in that period, including one that was effectively an email system running on a BBS. dedicated, true, but at least it went reasonably fast - ironically to fast, we were all used to having lots more time to think about our moves!
The first MP game had started too - I actually played on the original PDP-10 hosted MP dungeon, invented in the UK...it was...well, primitive, but at the time it was bloody fantastic!
No online shopping probably means a much bigger telesales market, but there would be one huge difference - a smaller number of big companies, who could afford it, rather than the huge number of small companies we have now.
Not convinced about more newspapers and magazines, I suspect TV would be filling that niche.
A more uniform culture? I'd say it could well the the opposite, lots of small relatively local stuff. The difference would be people in another part of the world wouldnt know about it.
I really dont see why it would slow the TV news cycle.
If you have BBS systems linking up into the Internet, then you have the Internet (again). There's no fundamental difference between the Internet as we now have it and the Internet as it would be descended from internetworked BBSes (besides of course technical details that the end-user wouldn't care about). So that's just cheating, because you're saying that the effect of the OP's change would be to negate the OP's change. No Internet means no Internet, period, not no NSFNET but instead internetworked local communities. (It's kinda meaningless to try to make distinctions between the different types of Internet anyways. BBS? Internet. NSFNET? Internet. JANET? Internet. They're all part of the Internet, or Internets themselves, or whatever. There's no essential difference between them.)
I'm not being condescending. I'm suggesting you don't quite understand the OP's question.
And that's why you don't quite understand the OP's question.
You were one of those "phreakers and comm geeks" I wrote about, I was too to a certain extent, and we both were part of a minuscule minority.
You write about having to build your won PC in 1978. Imagine if, in order to have a computer of even modest capabilities, you needed to build your own in 1988 or 1998 or even 2008. Do you believe the dial-up/BBS/file sharing system you're proposing would replace the internet would have even a tiny fraction of the capabilities OTL's internet?
I assume you mean intranet company services, btw
The utilities I worked with called them infranets, what you called them in the UK could very well be something else; i.e. truck/lorry, hood/bonnet, etc., so it makes no difference as you knew what I meant.
And do you assume that would automatically occur at anywhere near the speed it did in the OTL?
No. Unlike you what I'm not forgetting is that explosive growth didn't have to happen.
What were the factors that drove it? Would it still occur if those factors were removed or altered? I think not.
Look at it this way, would 90-year-olds be using e-mail if they had to type command lines?
No it doesn't. It seems like an indispensable part of daily life now, but it needn't have occurred at all.
Personal computing and the internet are nothing like the older, "it's going to happen" invention at all. You believe that because you were involved in IT early on and thus cannot quite grasp the worldview of those outside it.
We're not talking about the "race" for the light bulb, telephone, airplane, or hundreds of other things. There weren't hundreds of inventors worldwide competing and collaborating because they knew an "internet" would be the ticket to fame and fortune.
I see limited groupings of BBSs being utilized by people who are one step up from the hobbyists you and I were and those groups of BBSs linked more like island chains than in a "web". I see cellphones "dialing up" to access limited functions offered by specific companies, not browsing a "web" to potentially access everything/anything, and controlling those functions by key strokes, not by icons.
Things could have gone very differently without the PC revolution of the mid-1980s.
No. Following the OP's question, I'm, assuming nothing fills that needs for fater communications precisely like the internet does
More telesales certainly, but more "brick & mortar" shopping because that allows people to see the goods in question. Until phones in this time lines develop the screens they have now, telesales will still be "blind".
Trust me. Among my clients is a former world leader in the manufacturing of newspaper pre-press, printing, and post-press equipment. They're all but dead. Management is currently working on the best way to sell the firm's assets and shut down. No internet means more newspapers and magazines than we have now, because, as with shopping above, phones cannot show pictures that are big enough.
More uniform culture across the whole of society as more local cultures can be more easily "broadcast". Locals will naturally know about local stuff. On the other hand, someone in Tokyo isn't going to be following hot dog eating competitions in the US with such interest that they join the "circuit".
Because the news won't be disseminated as quickly as a blog spot can be written or video posted on-line. It will have to wait for a newspaper to be printed or a broadcast to be made.
I assume the OP is about a world with no world wide web (c. 1990) and no e-mail available to the public. That leaves us in the world Bill Gates envisioned in the early eighties when he said the maximum memory capacity for DOS could be 640k because "that should be enough memory for anybody."
You would be freezing technology somewhere between the 64k chip of the early eighties and the "impressive" '386 machines with 640k or 68000 Macs with a whole megabyte of memory.
Do fax machines "explode" on the market as they did in 1988 OTL? If not, we are still living with the printed catalogs, snail mail, brick-and-mortar stores, etc., with which we were content in 1985. If yes, the fax machine remains the cutting edge of quasi-instant communication.
Edit: Since nobody added to this thread yet, I will add another issue. Without the Internet, you preserve the need of not only newspapers and encyclopedias, but the need for experienced people who either know certain detailed information or know where to quickly find it. In addition, you preserve the need for clerical people who must handle hard copy information.
You would be freezing technology somewhere between the 64k chip of the early eighties and the "impressive" '386 machines with 640k or 68000 Macs with a whole megabyte of memory.
Do fax machines "explode" on the market as they did in 1988 OTL? If not, we are still living with the printed catalogs, snail mail, brick-and-mortar stores, etc., with which we were content in 1985. If yes, the fax machine remains the cutting edge of quasi-instant communication.
Edit: Since nobody added to this thread yet, I will add another issue. Without the Internet, you preserve the need of not only newspapers and encyclopedias, but the need for experienced people who either know certain detailed information or know where to quickly find it. In addition, you preserve the need for clerical people who must handle hard copy information.
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