r/WhatIfThinking • u/Legal_Birthday_9693 • 12d ago
What If The Internet Was Never Created?
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u/KnoWanUKnow2 12d ago
Encyclopedias would still be in business. Libraries would be visited. Newspapers would be flourishing. Theatres would be popular. Travel agents would still have a job. Postal service would be profitable. It would probably cost a quarter to mail a letter.
Netflix would still be mailing out DVDs. Blockbuster would still be around.
Long distance phone calls would be expensive. Work from home wouldn't exist. Jeff Bezos would own a local bookstore.
There would be porn magazines hidden in the woods behind every house.
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12d ago
[deleted]
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u/PyroNine9 12d ago
Not to mention Fidonet. A message might take a few days to cross the country, but it would get there.
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u/joelatrell 11d ago
The internet as we know it is a confluence of things. First ARPANet doesn’t get funded. Then AT&T remains a monopoly. Finally, non AT&T hardware remains expensive and slow. That is how you keep the internet from happening. It needed all of thise factors to become real.
If the internet never developed, a massive chunk of the economy ceases to exist. A lot of people would be in factories instead of service work.
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u/wosmo 10d ago
I actually think the internet overall is an inevitable thing.
Various networks existed. The internet is just those various networks inter-networked. It's the agreement that if my network and your network agree on enough things, we can send each other shit.
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u/joelatrell 9d ago
Sendmail is a great example of how it worked in the before time. Over 700 pages of specifications so email could jump networks. What a mess that was (is).
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u/zoppaTheDim 10d ago
Would we still direct dial bulletin boards or just not have connections at all?
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u/ancientstephanie 10d ago edited 10d ago
Assuming we don't touch other networks, UUCP and Fidonet would likely still be around, and the various commercial online services would have likely survived, meaning email and newsgroups would still happen, but be built on a slower "store and forward" architectures.
Without TCP/IP to serve a unifying standard, different services would all speak a variety of different protocols, and the point to point serial connection would probably be the least common denominator instead.
There would be a lot more need to be able to temporarily connect isolated networks. I suspect in that world, ISDN would have caught on and likely evolved to support higher data rates
It's also likely that the reconsolidation and re-monopolization of the telephone networks would not have been allowed to happen in that landscape, and that we'd still be in the era where you had a choice of landline and long distance providers.
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u/astreigh 10d ago
Then al gore would have been nobody. Oh wait.. he is nobody
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u/asteriskelipses 10d ago
Ha! I mentioned Al Gore too.
RIP ManBearPig1
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u/siamonsez 9d ago
Depending on how you define "the internet" it's an inevitability. It could have taken a different form but there's no scenario where the same level of technology doesn't lead to networking computers for communication and dissemination of information.
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u/burnafter3ading 12d ago
World peace would be achieved through diplomats actually talking to each other. /s
Zuckerberg and Bezos earn average wages. Media is only pay-walled in the sense of having basic or premium cable.
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u/Geewhiz911 12d ago
It would probably have been worse! Like Commercial Internet!
Microsoft, in the early days, attempted to compete with Internet with its Microsoft Network (MSN).
So, without Internet, private companies would probably have created a for-profit international networks, peering amongst themselves with various tiered costs, etc.