Long term effects of No Internet

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."


Exactly. The content of this alt-internet would much more resemble to ASCII text file content of the BBSs Astrodragon and I wrote about rather than the the current graphics-rich content we unconsciously assume would be the case.

Form follows function. Our internet looks the way it does because we're accessing it using fat pipes, fast machines, wide screens, and big color palettes. An internet limited to narrow pipes, slow machines, tiny screens, and small color palettes that come with access primarily through hobbyist computers, linked BBSs, and cellphone will look profoundly different.

That internet won't look like ours does and, because it's formed differently, it will function differently and have fewer functions too. That internet won't be trying to access what is essentially our internet content with different tools. That internet will develop different content.

Form follows function.
 
I am interested in the responses to this question. I suspect there may be a generational dichotomy in how people would answer this question. People who grew up with the internet and see it as essential are probably more likely to see it as a massive - and good - revolution in human interaction equal to printing or even written language. Old fuddy duddies like me who remember when we got along perfectly well when we onlyhad manual typewriters, carbon paper, Ma Bell's phones, the US Mail, books, and just plain face-to-face interaction to communicate with each othermay be less likely to attribute millenial changes to the internet.

When you talk about "long term effects" this old duddy would answer that 21-25 years is just too short a time to evaluate what the long term effects of the internet will be. After the first 25 years of aviation, many people would probably have predicted huge Zeppelins or flying boats would be our main meains of long-distance air travel for the next 50 years.
 
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.

Frankly, you still need those. Google isn't God, you know, and a lot of the time an experienced librarian will get you places you never even knew you needed to go. And everything hasn't been digitized yet (believe me), so you still need people to handle the hard-copy stuff.
 
What we have now was inconceivable 25 years ago.

To anyone outside the industry, yes.

By 1985, however, many in the industry saw something like this as inevitable and many more saw it as VERY conceivable with the corresponding expansion of the existing technology. (My dad was amongst those in the second camp.)
 
By 1985...


You're correct. 1985 is too late to stop the internet as the PC boom has begun. I should have written 30 or 35 years instead.

Of course, the underlying point was still there even if the numbers didn't add up.

My dad was amongst those in the second camp.

Ask your dad what he whether he thought to internet was inevitable or even thought about the internet at all in 1980 or 1975 when personal computers were kits which required soldering, when the few graphics user interfaces that existed required light pens, and when the ball mouse was a nearly forgotten toy sitting in a Xerox lab.
 
You're correct. 1985 is too late to stop the internet as the PC boom has begun. I should have written 30 or 35 years instead.

Of course, the underlying point was still there even if the numbers didn't add up.



Ask your dad what he whether he thought to internet was inevitable or even thought about the internet at all in 1980 or 1975 when personal computers were kits which required soldering, when the few graphics user interfaces that existed required light pens, and when the ball mouse was a nearly forgotten toy sitting in a Xerox lab.

Actually, my father and I have had several conversations about it and, as he explained it to me, a whole lot of people were already working on the basis for the Internet long before he went to work for GTE in 1972.

My father pointed out to me that one of the things has to be remembered is that while the consumer component caused the Internet's exponential expansion, it was by no means it's point of origin or reason for being.

Telecom and computer researchers were already looking for ways build computer networks in the '60s. In the '70s they were looking to create an interchange between those networks and make the networks faster and more powerful.

By the mid-80's the Internet can actually be said to exist in it's original intended form: science, business, communications, information services, etc... all starting to link up on an increasingly globalized scale.

In that context, 1980 or even 1975 isn't even too soon to see an Internet (as the term was first coined in 1974) as an inevitability as entire industries, universities and governments around the globe were working towards that very goal.

Now, that very Internet becoming consumer driven and available in every home? Nobody was considering that in 1980. It would have seemed too ASB even to mention in 1980 or before even 1985 at the earliest.

The technology wasn't there yet. Wide spread computer literacy wasn't there yet. So many factors weren't in place yet that the Internet, as we know it today, is ASB come to life. There's no other way to put it.

Five years.

It only took a span of five years for all of that to change.

1985 is really THE year, as my dad and most of his colleagues saw it, because by then you had the introduction of hypertext and hypertext transfer protocols, DOS Maxthink and other similar programs, a major explosion in the home computer market, faster modems, increases in bandwidth availability, the introduction of computers into the classroom- in many places, as early as kindergarten- and the beginnings of the proliferation of on-line activity by users outside the labs, offices, universities, etc... along with the beginnings of parity of the very technology entering the home with what was being used in offices and labs (Mac, Atari ST, Amiga, PC/AT and it's clones, etc...), and the beginnings of subscription BBS services (like Compuserve) rising steadily all creating the environment into which the Internet as we think of it today would be created.

Hell, before the decade was out, the seeds of what we know today as the Internet, AOL, The World, Prodigy, etc...were already in people's homes with their own primitive forms of browsing for things we see today as Internet staples: news, weather, shopping (albeit, if I recall correctly, only on Prodigy and only through Sears) and some other sundries.

So, to sum up:

Internet as originally conceived: Viewed as an inevitability well before 1975 because entire industries and governments were working on building it.

Internet as what it is today: an Internet of chat boards, on-line gaming, shopping, media exchange, and all the consumer and leisure applications we associate with it today, in every home?

Not until 1985 at the earliest and an example of ASB as reality.
 
You're correct. 1985 is too late to stop the internet as the PC boom has begun. I should have written 30 or 35 years instead.

The point remains that computer technology could have stalled out at any time. By the late eighties, there was talk that in a few years, miniaturization would reach its limit as background radiation and EMF would force components to retain a certain size. The large hard drives of the nineties and beyond are the result of a Nobel prize winning breakthrough, something that could have been butterflied away.

While the concept of the Internet goes back many decades, the consumer-friendly WWW does not come until well after 1985. Without it, you are limited by slow modems and high phone bills.

Because we know the progress of technology in the past decades, we think it would be ASB for Internet penetration not to happen. The biggest moguls in the business could not prepare for the progress in the eighties: Microsoft had to introduce "extended memory" and Apple had to scramble to upgrade its 1984 Macintosh to keep pace with the late eighties.
 

Niq

Banned
I would say impact of internet is far more important culturally than economically. English might not be such a global language as it is now. There would be more diversity in cultures, American global consumer capitalism culture would not be as important as it is now. People would buy their media, this also adds to cultural diversity. Spread of ideas would be by far slower and it would be much more easily controlled by governments. Economically I believe Asia would be in stronger position. I belive conservative values would be stronger and people would not be as interested in politics as they are now.
 
While the concept of the Internet goes back many decades, the consumer-friendly WWW does not come until well after 1985. Without it, you are limited by slow modems and high phone bills.


That's precisely my point. An "internet" accessed via "fat pipes" using "fast" computers whose cost and learning curve are both trivial is not a given.

Because we know the progress of technology in the past decades, we think it would be ASB for Internet penetration not to happen.

Again, that's the point I've been trying to make. The internet we currently have, plus it's attributes and uses, is completely taken for granted. It's so ubiquitous, it's so woven into our lives, that it's very hard to imagine living without it. Too many of us simply cannot grasp the idea of a "No internet" or "Slow internet" or "Small internet" world because the internet seems like such a no-brainer.

If any one of a dozen hurdles were put in place for any one of the dozens of changes, breakthroughs, and business decisions, the internet would easily resemble the linked BBS model I've mentioned earlier and it's content would more resemble the content of the old ASCII text file days than our current graphics intensive/embedded GUI version.
 
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