No internet?

Could we see by 2010(without Nuclear apocalypse/Yellowstone etc, and with the Soviet Union still collapsing) a 2010 in which the internet(at least in its public form, ideally in any form) does not exist? Or if not, how long could it plausibly have been delayed?

Needless to say this would mean a fundamentally different society, economy and politics on a national and global level, mostly of a negative nature methinks. Would their be any positives?
 
Well one positive is we wouldn't have had a dot.com bubble and all the resultant scandals. I think many of the traditional retailers who have been put out of business or forced to downsize due to inline competition would still be around. In terms of information we'd still be at the level of the early 1990's, we'd still have 24 hour news networks, low cost air travel wouldn't have grown to the same extent without web bookings. Mobile phones would still be primarily based around telephone calls and texts, no iPhone or other smartphones and we wouldn't be having this discussion as this forum wouldn't exist! ;)

As to how the Internet could have been prevented, perhaps governments, fearful of the consequences of people being able to access so much information make the net a classified resource?
 
As to how the Internet could have been prevented, perhaps governments, fearful of the consequences of people being able to access so much information make the net a classified resource?

That's nothing short of ASB in western democracies.

I think the internet could have been delayed by 5 to 10 years with a post-WWII-POD. Let's say the US Military does not open ARPANET for non-military use. It might then take computer science students a few years more to establish the first non-military network, but as soon as you have this, there's no way to stop the internet from spreading. This means you still have the internet around in 2010.
 
Unless you delay the development of the personal computer by ten years as well, then you might delay a popular internet a little longer yet (i.e. the internet would still be there, just only used by academics and military).

I don't think this is ASB, I just can't come up with a plausible way to do it off the top of my head.
 
many more magazines and newspapers.


more dead trees!


and the ancient ritual of nervously "sneaking" into and out of a store to obtain pornography does not die out.
 
That's nothing short of ASB in western democracies.

Or ASBish period. Once those techno-geeks in Calif. got the first parts of the Internet up and running in April of 1969, there was no stopping it, even the creation of ARPANET in 1971-72{I can see ARPANET being butterflied, though. You would definitely need a POD before 1971, though.}.
 
Without the Internet, figure that online companies like CompuServe, Portal and Genie would have provided many of the same services, which they did historically until the World Wide Web made the previously mostly text-based Internet more accessible. Many of the computer bulletin board services would have continued to flourish.

When modems got fast enough to support acceptable graphics, something like the World Wide Web would have probably evolved, though it might have been fragmented. I know Commodore had something sort of web-like in the early days of the world wide web. I think it was called Amiga-guide. I could see Apple coming up with its own standard for rich online content, and maybe each of the biggest oniine service providers coming up with their own, and maybe Microsoft coming up with its own version, with the smaller services banding together behind yet another standard.

The result wouldn't be the Internet we have, though there would be similarities. The big online retailers would have probably been delayed or prevented altogether by the lack of standards, though that wouldn't have prevented smaller retailers from grabbing niches. You might see service providers like CompuServe doing something similar to Apple's App store, only with physical merchandise.
 
Without the Internet, figure that online companies like CompuServe, Portal and Genie would have provided many of the same services, which they did historically until the World Wide Web made the previously mostly text-based Internet more accessible. Many of the computer bulletin board services would have continued to flourish.

When modems got fast enough to support acceptable graphics, something like the World Wide Web would have probably evolved, though it might have been fragmented. I know Commodore had something sort of web-like in the early days of the world wide web. I think it was called Amiga-guide. I could see Apple coming up with its own standard for rich online content, and maybe each of the biggest oniine service providers coming up with their own, and maybe Microsoft coming up with its own version, with the smaller services banding together behind yet another standard.

The result wouldn't be the Internet we have, though there would be similarities. The big online retailers would have probably been delayed or prevented altogether by the lack of standards, though that wouldn't have prevented smaller retailers from grabbing niches. You might see service providers like CompuServe doing something similar to Apple's App store, only with physical merchandise.

Good point, I guess.............but what would the worldwide network connecting all these BBSes be called, though? :p
 
Simplest way I can think to delay the internet is to delay the transistor somehow. Keeping electronics big, bulky, expensive, and unreliable will slow things down. How to delay the transistor is a problem though.
 
You might be able to prevent the widespread adoption of the Internet if the old traditional AT&T monopoly on telephone wires and anything attached to them was maintained. That wouldn't prevent high-speed communications between large businesses and universities with the ability to run their own wires, but it could keep the Internet out of homes for a while. Of course cable companies would have to somehow be prevented from installing alternate wiring for their own purposes or things would just bypass the phone systems.

Here's a possibility: Instead of coming out with a PC, IBM does the same thing DEC did. They come out with crippled, low-end versions of each of the several IBM lines that came close to being a PC, with proprietary operating systems and a mainly closed architecture. The personal computer industry keeps bumping along with mainly incompatible 8-bit computers for another several years, with IBM loyalists in the IT departments of most companies sticking with IBM products. AT&T was broken up partly so they could compete with IBM in the computer market. That doesn't happen because the computer market doesn't grow anywhere near as fast without a standard to rally around, and there is no dominant force in the computer market. AT&T resists use of their lines for non-AT&T products, delaying mass-production of modems.

And that still doesn't get to where the OP wanted to be. You could delay the personal computer revolution by several years, and the mass advent of the Internet by a similar amount of time, but eventually processors and memory and all of the other elements would emerge, and you would end up with something similar. Computers might be based on Motorola 68000-series chips instead of Intel 8X086 chips, or it might have even been based on one of the more exotic alternatives like the Zilog Z8000, or the high-end 6502 successor Commodore was working on (the 65000), but the pieces would have eventually come together.
 
The result wouldn't be the Internet we have, though there would be similarities. The big online retailers would have probably been delayed or prevented altogether by the lack of standards, though that wouldn't have prevented smaller retailers from grabbing niches. You might see service providers like CompuServe doing something similar to Apple's App store, only with physical merchandise.

Yes.

Within three to four years, the services that offer the most content for the cheapest price (i.e. free, but advertisement funded) are going to win out. These companies will probably be people like Microsoft or Apple, since they'd bundle the software in with their operating systems. However, there will also be upstarts that look a lot like AOL using guerilla marketing tactics to advance to the top rather quickly.
 
Well one positive is we wouldn't have had a dot.com bubble and all the resultant scandals. I think many of the traditional retailers who have been put out of business or forced to downsize due to inline competition would still be around. In terms of information we'd still be at the level of the early 1990's, we'd still have 24 hour news networks, low cost air travel wouldn't have grown to the same extent without web bookings. Mobile phones would still be primarily based around telephone calls and texts, no iPhone or other smartphones and we wouldn't be having this discussion as this forum wouldn't exist! ;)

As to how the Internet could have been prevented, perhaps governments, fearful of the consequences of people being able to access so much information make the net a classified resource?

I would agree and add that dialup BBS'es would still be popular along with Fidonet. Fidonet was like an "electronic pony express" of networked BBS'es where they would relay messages to a local hub, then a State/Area hub, then a regional one, then a national one and so on. In the wee hours of the morning, they had a "National Mail Hour" where most things were relayed. Most of the time, it would take generally a day for the world to be updated. Fidonet was not instantanious unless you send a special Fidonet Mail in which you had to pay for through an account with your local sysop, but it was a fast way for it's time in the 1980's and 1990's. In some ways, I miss it.
 
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