No Digital Age?

Is the digital age unavoidable or no? If it is what would the impact of it not happening or being set back greatly have on history afterwards? Isn’t the advances in computers and microchips pretty separate from most industrial and atomic age technology at its roots? Would advances in technology focus more on machinery and atomic power in this pod? Technology advancement seems like it is pretty steady and forward moving once the industrial revolution takes off but when reading about advances in micro and computer technology it seemed more random or separate from other fields. Science isn’t my strongest field so I would like to know is the digital age a given or no? If no what impact on culture and economics does this have on the world especially the US and Europe?
 
Watch the Sliders episode, "Gillian of the Spirits", there's a alternate Earth where new technology is outlawed after the bombing of Hiroshima, where it's stuck in the 1950's.
 
Micro film & fiche made me motion sick. WTF was with that? I don't miss those. How many folks remember Verticle Files in the library. Anyone still have a Rolodex in reach.
 
I can see a few directions this could go:

Aliens keep Earth in an arrested state. This happened in Cixin Liu's book the Three Body Problem, where aliens obstructed basic science research to brute force prevent technological development. This is the very definition of ASB.

There could be some taboo, in a society or the planet as a whole. The protagonist in that story would usually be the scientist who broke the rules...

Unless there is some obstacle, the development of other tech will stimulate the development of computers, because the math they help do is important for ballistics, rocketry, design, control systems, cryptography, etc.

It would be an interesting, and not impossible to imagine scenario, where the digital tech does not make the leap to consumer entertainment product. So in effect it remains the realm of a particular class: universities, the military, finance. Imagine what the demand for computers would be if they were all DOS towers running only spreadsheets and databases.
 
Imagine what the demand for computers would be if they were all DOS towers running only spreadsheets and databases.

That still puts one on every professional's desk, enough demand for laptops that they probably exist in some form and leaves a lot of us tinkering with supposed business machines in the basement. In fact I'd say that you have almost have to eliminate those desktop applications or consumer uses will emerge by virtue of the number of users. What happens with little changing but the lack of semiconducters (or perhaps them being known but wildly expensive) is probably getting more to the original idea, and I have to think that at a high level we'll see much more advanced mechanical and vacum tube based systems getting us a lot of the same BRANCHES of technology we did, but yes, much less refined, much less consumer oriented, and in a lot of ways much more than 1950s vision of where things would go.
 
That still puts one on every professional's desk, enough demand for laptops that they probably exist in some form and leaves a lot of us tinkering with supposed business machines in the basement. In fact I'd say that you have almost have to eliminate those desktop applications or consumer uses will emerge by virtue of the number of users. What happens with little changing but the lack of semiconducters (or perhaps them being known but wildly expensive) is probably getting more to the original idea, and I have to think that at a high level we'll see much more advanced mechanical and vacum tube based systems getting us a lot of the same BRANCHES of technology we did, but yes, much less refined, much less consumer oriented, and in a lot of ways much more than 1950s vision of where things would go.
I don't see a way to get rid of semiconductors without changing Physics. I was thinking that if there was no market for consumer computers, because there were no consumer applications, then the economy of scale would keep them too expensive to be in every household. So a market version of what you were saying. Although I find it hard to believe that the idea of "computer game" would not occur to some American or Japanese nerd in a basement.
 
Watch the Sliders episode, "Gillian of the Spirits", there's a alternate Earth where new technology is outlawed after the bombing of Hiroshima, where it's stuck in the 1950's.
I’m not talking about a complete stop in technological progress. Think fallout which inspired this a bit. Maybe atomic base technology taking the place of digital technology?
 
I’m not talking about a complete stop in technological progress. Think fallout which inspired this a bit. Maybe atomic base technology taking the place of digital technology?

It's unlikely that avoiding the digital age would lead to total societal stagnation: If nothing else, fashion trends would keep changing because Sears wants you to shop for new clothes every year. However, a society focused heavily on atomic energy requires a POD that averts the backlash to nuclear power that began in the late 1970s. You're likely to continue seeing advancements in industrial processes and biotechnology. In fact, scientific progress in other areas might be more rapid than OTL, because the human and financial capital invested into digital companies IOTL will go somewhere else.

Socially, you're likely to continue seeing the dominance of centralized mass media (ABC, NBC, and CBS vs. YouTube, Twitter, and chatrooms), which makes societal trends more uniform and politics more sedate. Economic growth and unemployment will both be lower than OTL due to the continued dominance of in-person retail, and Silicon Valley will be a much less important economic center.
 
There was a Netflix series set in an alternate reality where the internet was never invented or at least never cleared for civilian use, and instead it's an 1970ies/1980ies - punk setting where everything is a faxmachine
 
What series?
It's called "Maniac", a mininseries set in this alternate timeline, about people who already have trouble to tell reality and hallucinations apart participating in a really weird drug test. The setting adds to the confusion because you are never sure if this is meant to be the "actual" in-universe reality, but it's obvious they had a lot of fun inventing a world just as wild and disturbing as ours but with retrotech shortcuts. There ARE computers, even computers arguably more advanced than ours because they are treated as sentient, but only accessible to megacorporations and their mad scientists. It's really like how an early 1980ies person would imagine the 21st century (a bit like Back To The Future 2, I suppose)

It was nicely creepy in that I genuinely wondered if that's what our world could have been like, if we took a wrong turn somewhere, though it's a lot of tongue-in-cheek. It highlights how much our world has changed in such a short time, and that this can't be taken for granted.
 
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It's called "Maniac", a mininseries set in this alternate timeline, about people who already have trouble to tell reality and hallucinations apart participating in a really weird drug test. The setting adds to the confusion because you are never sure if this is meant to be the "actual" in-universe reality, but it's obvious they had a lot of fun inventing a world just as wild and disturbing as ours but with retrotech shortcuts. There ARE computers, even computers arguably more advanced than ours because they are treated as sentient, but only accessible to megacorporations and their mad scientists. ...

I've had fun watching that one. Hope to revisit several episodes soon.

My other thought is a all out nuclear war in the 1970s sets the technology advance back a bit.
 
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