alternatehistory.com

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?
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