What if the World Wide Web wasn't invented, or failed to become popular?

A few things to ponder.

1) If the Web was never invented, or failed to take off after it was invented (for example if CERN decided they wanted to keep it), would the Internet itself (which contrary to popular belief, is not just the Web) have gone the way of CB radio, or never left the academic and corporate fields and become mainstream in homes beyond "geeks"? Do we end up using some knockoff of Gopher or Veronica instead and the Internet revolution still happens?

2) Would we still be using the same technology we were in the 1980s and early 1990s, with few improvements? Or would it just evolve differently? The fiber optics revolution of the late 80s and early 90s is largely what allowed the Web to scale so much, so perhaps cell phones, fax and videophones would fill in many of the niches that otherwise would have been on the Web?

3) Would the "Web concept" perhaps be thought up of by somebody else and run on the telephone/fax system and the URL and hyperlink concepts manifest onto a different vector than the Internet or computers?

4) Without Tim Berners-Lee's Web, even if the Internet or something web-like arises in its place, would this have massive butterfly effects? Would this Web possibly be better or worse at being a vector for globalization than the one we have now? Would China's economy have grown at a different pace and would America have still had the Great Recession?
 
When you really think about it, the invention of the Web was a "singularity" of sorts, much like the creation of life on Earth, the discovery of the New World, and the invention of Morse Code.
 
Even without the Web, there were companies such as Compuserve and AOL who were offering services such as e-mail, file-sharing and discussion forums. Without the web, I suspect that there would be increased efforts by these companies to get their networks to work together. Telecom companies would also get involved in this area (e.g. an extension of the UK's Prestel system or the French Minitel).


Cheers,
Nigel.
 
Even without the Web, there were companies such as Compuserve and AOL who were offering services such as e-mail, file-sharing and discussion forums. Without the web, I suspect that there would be increased efforts by these companies to get their networks to work together. Telecom companies would also get involved in this area (e.g. an extension of the UK's Prestel system or the French Minitel).


Cheers,
Nigel.

Good point. The Internet and the online services were already getting fairly popular even before the Web became a thing around 1995.

I'm of the opinion that the Internet still would have scaled without the Web, it would just be a bit different from how it is now.
 
If the WWW didn't became popular, an other way of world wide communication would have been invented, probably.
I don't think that there is a way that humanity wouldn't have found an other way of communication.
 

nbcman

Donor
Once people figured out that you could share p0rn on the interwebs, it was inevitable that some world wide means of sharing those images would arise.
 

Tovarich

Banned
A few things to ponder.

1) If the Web was never invented, or failed to take off after it was invented (for example if CERN decided they wanted to keep it), would the Internet itself (which contrary to popular belief, is not just the Web) have gone the way of CB radio, or never left the academic and corporate fields and become mainstream in homes beyond "geeks"? Do we end up using some knockoff of Gopher or Veronica instead and the Internet revolution still happens?
I am now happily imagining the academics round my workplace communicating with each other like "Big Prof, this here's Rubber Doc, and I'm about to put the Queen Square Hammer down." :D

Somebody please write that tl!
 
If the WWW didn't became popular, an other way of world wide communication would have been invented, probably.
I don't think that there is a way that humanity wouldn't have found an other way of communication.

I agree.

Another interesting thing to think about is what if Europe stuck with OSI? Would we have two different Webs - a TCP/IP web and an OSI web, perhaps with limited interconnectivity? Such a situation might not even change things much since most Internet traffic is within countries. It would make it harder to buy products from international countries though, and harder to meet foreigners.
 
A few things to ponder.

1) If the Web was never invented, or failed to take off after it was invented (for example if CERN decided they wanted to keep it), would the Internet itself (which contrary to popular belief, is not just the Web) have gone the way of CB radio, or never left the academic and corporate fields and become mainstream in homes beyond "geeks"? Do we end up using some knockoff of Gopher or Veronica instead and the Internet revolution still happens?

2) Would we still be using the same technology we were in the 1980s and early 1990s, with few improvements? Or would it just evolve differently? The fiber optics revolution of the late 80s and early 90s is largely what allowed the Web to scale so much, so perhaps cell phones, fax and videophones would fill in many of the niches that otherwise would have been on the Web?

3) Would the "Web concept" perhaps be thought up of by somebody else and run on the telephone/fax system and the URL and hyperlink concepts manifest onto a different vector than the Internet or computers?

4) Without Tim Berners-Lee's Web, even if the Internet or something web-like arises in its place, would this have massive butterfly effects? Would this Web possibly be better or worse at being a vector for globalization than the one we have now? Would China's economy have grown at a different pace and would America have still had the Great Recession?

TBH, this is all highly unlikely. By the start of the '90s, something *would* have given-best you can do is delay the Web's popularity.
 
TBH, this is all highly unlikely. By the start of the '90s, something *would* have given-best you can do is delay the Web's popularity.

Actually for the first couple years people didn't think much of the Web browser. You have to remember that in the early 1990s most people didn't own computers and even those who did use computers mostly used them for relatively simple tasks like video games and word processing.

Setting up an Internet connection took a bit of know how before Windows 95 and there wasn't much to see anyway so most people didn't bother.
 
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