What if the computer is never invented?
- Thread starter Aviennca's Pupil
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Colossus where are you? When I butterflied WWII my thoughts went to a less rapid aviation industry and slowed pace for digital electronics. The older mechanical and vacuum-tube technology not just survives but stays the state of the art for maybe another generation, not because technology itself is slowed but the necessity is lessened. Reaching back to a Germany that has no need for ballistic missiles delayed the space race and use of space for communications, proprietary national phone companies build proto-networks for data that short circuit the global information web behind a patchwork of differing systems. It all functions less easily, less consumer friendly, its is more expensive, less robust and less ingrained in our lives. So I imagine a world with clunkier, bulkier more costly "tech", less automation and lower conveniences perhaps but on the big scale not much is lost. Not quite any dash punk but maybe more retro-looking. Here I see technology looking more like how science fiction envisioned it, so take 2001 and make it fact. Pan-Am in space, AT&T videophones using CRT screens, and so forth.
Perhaps the OP meant “no electronic computers.”
Lacking modern micro-miniaturized electronic chips, computers would never develop beyond Babbege’s clockwork Difference Engine.
In another timeline, computers run on hydraulics. Compressed air or a liquid move data through increasingly tiny capillaries. Makes me think of the fluidic valves and fuel pumps in 1980s vintage CF-18 fighter jets.
Lacking modern micro-miniaturized electronic chips, computers would never develop beyond Babbege’s clockwork Difference Engine.
In another timeline, computers run on hydraulics. Compressed air or a liquid move data through increasingly tiny capillaries. Makes me think of the fluidic valves and fuel pumps in 1980s vintage CF-18 fighter jets.
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As one who cut his teeth employing an IBM 650 to solve my blackboard covering variational calculus zoom climb equations under USAF contract, I can appreciate the difference between the room-size vacuum tube, drum memory monsters, and the equipment of today. Prior to the 650, or its UNIVAC equivalent (do the punch cards have rectangular or round holes?) The programming of complex systems was not wildly different- the equations were broken down into a series of simple sequential steps, most involving underpaid undergraduate young ladies with adding machines, Monroe calculators (loud extinct mechanical devices) and a few with tables of logarithms or trig functions. The answers that emerged at the end of the line were sparse data points, but sufficient to lead the physicists and engineers of that era into technology that has transformed our time.
The difference today is that ultrafast, almost universally available computing power has been relied on beyond the point where appropriately skilled human judgement should take over (I'm writing from an engineering standpoint; politicians' opinions may vary).
What is called a "computer" today is far less an equation solving machine, than a compact communication-entertainment device. But then I was never able to watch cute cat antics on my slide-rule.
Dynasoar
The difference today is that ultrafast, almost universally available computing power has been relied on beyond the point where appropriately skilled human judgement should take over (I'm writing from an engineering standpoint; politicians' opinions may vary).
What is called a "computer" today is far less an equation solving machine, than a compact communication-entertainment device. But then I was never able to watch cute cat antics on my slide-rule.
Dynasoar
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Rigger,
Just reread your #25. Yes, lots of alternate means of developing computational logic. In thirties Germany an engineer employed telephone relay logic in a programmable computing device. Here Librascope and Electronics Associates developed analog devices employing variation in voltage to approximately solve physical problems.
The wildest digital system was a relatively small laminated ceramic block containing a huge number of "fluidic" flip-flops, driven by a flow of high-pressure helium, as the flight-navigational computer in a proposed hypersonic low altitude guided missile that operated at temperatures in the red heat range.
Dynasoar
Just reread your #25. Yes, lots of alternate means of developing computational logic. In thirties Germany an engineer employed telephone relay logic in a programmable computing device. Here Librascope and Electronics Associates developed analog devices employing variation in voltage to approximately solve physical problems.
The wildest digital system was a relatively small laminated ceramic block containing a huge number of "fluidic" flip-flops, driven by a flow of high-pressure helium, as the flight-navigational computer in a proposed hypersonic low altitude guided missile that operated at temperatures in the red heat range.
Dynasoar
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Already OTL
In the most basic sense, the valve body on automatic transmissions are simple hydraulic computers. They have a program, where outputs are modified by differing input values.
Plus, 'real' hydraulic computers early on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC
Because Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, USN found a dead insect in the machine and it was fouling things up or something like that.
If computers weren't invented I wouldn't be able to watch my hentai.
Jking, but in seriousness if computers weren't invented nor would this site be created.
Jking, but in seriousness if computers weren't invented nor would this site be created.
Microchips took a tremendous amount of government-sponsored work earmarked for missiles. Butterfly away the space race, and you can freeze electronics at the transistor level for quite some time. Computers would remain the mainframe devices of the sixties for a long time.