Dr. Strangelove
Banned
If there had been a larger time period between the wide spread adoption of the telephone and the invention of the radio maybe the would be some form of cable radio. You would dial in on your home phone to listen to the news, weather reports music and entertainment. You would need to plug in a better set of speakers instead of the hand set of cause to hear through out the room.
Another thing could be instead of putting steam engines on wheels they are use to pull a cable. Similar to San Francisco trolley cars but over head so that canal boats can clamp on and be dragged along up stream faster then by animal/human power.
They'll build one within 25 years I believe.
Some ideas of averted technologies, or technologies that weren't quite averted per se but were largely ignored in favor of other technologies:
- basically, any alternatives to missile-like rockets for space flight. The Soviets started their space program with converted missiles, the Americans followed, and spaceplanes, nuclear-pulse/Orion, and other possible methods of propelling oneself into space never made it big. There is a good reason for this, of course - for example, the Shuttle has proved that a poorly designed space plane is actually more expensive than a conventional rocket, while using nuclear-pulse in the lower atmosphere will most likely result in a spike in cancers and mutant hordes.
- zeppelins and balloons, of course. They weren't quite "averted" but were largely pushed aside in favor of aircraft.
- Many types of storage on computers. For example, electro-optical drives were almost unknown, despite offering greater capacity for the price in the latter 1980s, mainly due to being very slow (the original NeXT computer had a 640 megabyte model, largely because a similarly-sized hard disk would have added $5000 to the cost of the machine). CD-RW and DVD-RW overtook "superfloppies" in the late 1990s - successors to Iomega's popular Zip drive from the early-mid 90s never sold or developed successors themselves, thus leaving us with no multi-gigabyte 'floppy' drives around nowadays. Or battery-backed RAM, which saw limited use in portables back in the 1980s. Advances and use of these technologies was largely limited in favor of hard disk drives, and also CDs/DVDs. Finally, a possible hard disk replacement is coming out in the form of flash memory.
- Same with 'control devices'. One wonders what would have happened if Apple and others had not decided to develop upon Xerox's idea of the mouse. The alternative could be anything from a more ergonomical touchscreen concept (think Nintendo DS - have two screens, one for 'touching', one not), to using something more like a joystick (which could see parallel evolution into a trackball or trackpad independent of conventional mice. Or perhaps keyboard development would have gone further instead... perhaps even full-bore GUIs might be delayed, or evolve in a completely different manner...
- Need I mention Betamax vs. VHS? Or Video CDs, which are almost unknown outside of Southeast Asia. Or even alternatives. Perhaps a cartridge-based video system? After all, for many years video *GAMES* were mostly distributed on cartridges. They would allow the same machine to be used to watch movies of vastly different lengths without resorting to different compression techniques. It also, conveniently for the big-shot movie companies, make it harder to use such machines for home video recording (although one could still make blank cartridges or a cartridge-cassette converter for this purpose).
you have USB keys that are becoming so widespread that new computers don't have floppy drive by default (you can install it extra). USB is new floppy. Simple to use and no extra attachments. Zip drives required extra hardware which could be problematic for transfers between computers.
Am I the only one mourning the death (or at least, terminal geriatricity) of the floppy, mewonders? (Basically only 'cause they work better with older computers, and generally with DOS).
Could we get ZIP discs/drives (or their successors) to work? Additional hardware could be overcome by building internal ones into new computers and laptops...
I'd consider having some sort of keyboard-controlled environment, possibly with tabs instead of windows for multi-tasking, which could be accessed by keystrokes. Sort of like some old DOS shells, but could actually have programs running under it.
How do these cartridges work? (i.e. existing game ones, and video by analogy.) If by some form of ROM, then home recording may have to wait until flash memory becomes a reality. Plus we might have format wars over different cartridge types...
Could we get ZIP discs/drives (or their successors) to work? Additional hardware could be overcome by building internal ones into new computers and laptops...
you'd have to delay USB devices. Once USB keys become big (in space power) and cheap then ZIPs are doomed. You already have USB ports on computer so using keys is just a question of software. ZIPs, however, would require new hardware and hence would raise the price. Plus USBs are small while ZIPs are big and sometimes impractical to carry around
Biggest way to get this would be to delay or avert writable/re-writable CDs, which are cheaper and can also play existing CD-ROM software.
I'm not sure, as all the world's GUI development would be vastly different, starting with the Apple Lisa...
They'd likely be ROM, much like video game cartridges. I figure "home videos" would be essentially cassette tapes hooked to an "Adapter" cartridge - I think some early home computers even had cartridge-plugged cassette players for programs on tape.
- Many types of storage on computers. For example, electro-optical drives were almost unknown,[…]. CD-RW and DVD-RW overtook "superfloppies" in the late 1990s - successors to Iomega's popular Zip drive from the early-mid 90s never sold or developed successors themselves, thus leaving us with no multi-gigabyte 'floppy' drives around nowadays.
- Same with 'control devices'. […] The alternative could be anything from a more ergonomical touchscreen concept (think Nintendo DS - have two screens, one for 'touching', one not), […].
- Or Video CDs, which are almost unknown outside of Southeast Asia. Or even alternatives.