WI: World without the World-Wide-Web?

As You Were

Communications would be much as they were before the web. Longdistance phone calls would be more common. Postal mail and post cards would still be with us. more advertising would appear on television and radio. Television would still be in use. Things would take longer to develop. A good idea would take place. It would happen slowley. Older people ( such as me) used to communicate that way. I rember stores haveing mechanical cashregisters. You could go into someone office and not see a computer. Travlers read books and newspapers. People would talk about what they read in the paper.
 

Sachyriel

Banned
We would all be sadder since we would have no AH.com.The worst part is that we would not be able to tell each other how sad we are, and talk about how if things were different, they wouldn't be like this.
 
If the system we now call the World Wide Web had flopped I suspect that cellphone and satellite communications would've resulted in the development of a satellite and/or radio communications equivilant of an Internet so instead of typing this on a computer that takes up a whole kitchen table on dial-up I'd be typing on a computer that looks more like an iPhone with a keyboard attached to it.

Websites as we know them today probably wouldn't exist because computer technology would've moved more towards the exchange of information rather than it's storage and most gaming would be far more interactive than in OTL simply because people would dial up a game and play it rather than download it from the Internet.
 
People are assuming either that the internet would have been replaced by the internet, or that we all remain luddites

IMHO mobile phones would not have a web element to them because there is no halfway stage to develop through. Phone-based coms including picture and video mailing would have developed, and cameras etc in a phone, but there would be no web to tie into, and no conceptual leap in creating one

CD Roms and DVD Roms would be popular

Now there IS an internet, but it is modem-based dial-up database type of thing, developing in its own way without the web...

Brain is mush
Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
Firstly could I clarify something, are we asking "What if the internet failed to develop?" as the OP says, "What if the World-Wide-Web wasn't invented?" as the thread title implies or "What if the internet failed to develop and the world-Wide -Web wasn't invented?" as responders to this thread seem to be assuming?

The reason I ask is that the Internet and WWW are 2 distinct, if related things. The Internet first began to develop as far back as 1958 when the US started to develop ARPA. This was spurred on by the launch of Sputnik. The WWW however wasn't invented until 1990.

The distinction is that the Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks whilst the WWW is a service that runs on that system. It would therefore be possible to have the Internet without the WWW (but not the WWW without the Internet)
 
Firstly could I clarify something, are we asking "What if the internet failed to develop?" as the OP says, "What if the World-Wide-Web wasn't invented?" as the thread title implies or "What if the internet failed to develop and the world-Wide -Web wasn't invented?" as responders to this thread seem to be assuming?

The reason I ask is that the Internet and WWW are 2 distinct, if related things. The Internet first began to develop as far back as 1958 when the US started to develop ARPA. This was spurred on by the launch of Sputnik. The WWW however wasn't invented until 1990.

The distinction is that the Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks whilst the WWW is a service that runs on that system. It would therefore be possible to have the Internet without the WWW (but not the WWW without the Internet)

Well I've been assuming there is an internet but no web. IIRC the net without the web was databases, newsgroups, electronic mail etc - certainly useful but not very glamorous.

I suppose one could postulate being able to do ALL of these things from your phone by now, in the absence of a web.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
Well I've been assuming there is an internet but no web. IIRC the net without the web was databases, newsgroups, electronic mail etc - certainly useful but not very glamorous.

I suppose one could postulate being able to do ALL of these things from your phone by now, in the absence of a web.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

Bulletin Boards (come on, some of you guys are old enough to remember them!!) would have evolved and taken the place of the WWW, probably...

After all, AH is basically a BB accessed via the internet.
 
Being stuck in 1989 would not be such a bad thing. We would have Microsoft Word 3.0, Excel 2.51, etc. By then, the computer had already revolutionized the office environment, before the web, even though 4 MB was considered a lot of memory and 30 MB a large hard drive.

For many, the web didn't actually "land" until 1994 or 1995.
 
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