Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to butterfly away the development of Personal Computers and the Internet, so they don't exist by 2022 or at least are still in development. Computers may exist, but only closet-sized ones in research. POD no earlier than 1960. What societal changes would the absence of Internet bring?
AHC: No Personal Computer
- Thread starter Nelson Mikeson
- Start date
Society freezes at the level of data exchange it had around 1980, maybe a little later since the www did not come until 1993. 1980 was a time when the DOS system was not fully developed. As it came along, Bill Gates was asked how big should the system be and his answer was "640k. That ought to be enough memory for anybody." At that time, early Apple computers and the Commodore 64 would not have been enough to revolutionize data exchange. Corporations, universities and governments still relied on mainframe computers with some phone modem capabilities.
To freeze out personal computers, you need to stop the miniaturization of integrated circuits and disk storage. By 1987, a 20 MB hard drive was a big deal. Maybe a war breaks out and the technology to produce smaller microcircuits remains classified. I'd say a POD around 1978 would do the trick for a while, but could it last 40 years?
marathag
Banned
With all the web surfing,cloud and streaming going on, most PC are just glorified Terminals anyway.
Terminals 'went away' when the data they needed couldn't be run over existing copper phone lines at 110 or the brand new full duplex 300 baud that the prices dropped to merely being 'expensive' in 1970s as the microcomputer using the new low cost, high performance 6502, 8080, 6800 or Z-80 CPUs.
I did my first 'Timeshares' with an PDP-8 Minicomputer via a 110 baud ASR-33 Teletype with the modem using acoustic cups to fit a Ma Bell Handset, despite the Carterfone decision that non AT&T devices can be hooked to the phone network being just a few years in the past, this being 1974 at the time.
300 baud modems were expensive, as was all computer gear back then.
I'm not a great touch typist, but I could type faster than 300 baud could update.
So 110 baud was very sedate, as far as transmission speed.
Everyone had the need for speed, be it aircraft cars or computers.
So that meant local, personal computers to run your programs
Terminals 'went away' when the data they needed couldn't be run over existing copper phone lines at 110 or the brand new full duplex 300 baud that the prices dropped to merely being 'expensive' in 1970s as the microcomputer using the new low cost, high performance 6502, 8080, 6800 or Z-80 CPUs.
I did my first 'Timeshares' with an PDP-8 Minicomputer via a 110 baud ASR-33 Teletype with the modem using acoustic cups to fit a Ma Bell Handset, despite the Carterfone decision that non AT&T devices can be hooked to the phone network being just a few years in the past, this being 1974 at the time.
300 baud modems were expensive, as was all computer gear back then.
I'm not a great touch typist, but I could type faster than 300 baud could update.
So 110 baud was very sedate, as far as transmission speed.
Everyone had the need for speed, be it aircraft cars or computers.
So that meant local, personal computers to run your programs
This is a massive insult modern PC, pre internet a PC was a revolution, for writing,to data management and so on, internet just give us real time data share no physical mail could match.
On the other hand this screw videogames too
As late as 2003, long distance phone bills could be quite costly, as was cell phone roaming. Even as computers remained as stand-alone devices, society's infrastructure of newspapers, radio, television and retailing remained intact. If AT&T retained enough iron clad control of its lines, the Interned could be suppressed. Dial-up modems were still common in 2005.
Driftless
Donor
I thought one of DARPA's goals with their part of distributed computing (which grew to the internet) was to decentralize computing as much as practical - to survive major disaster; nuclear war, or other catastrophe.
To some extent, there was always going to be some shade-tree techno-geeks cobbling together some form of system for their own purpose. To my mind, there's a certain inevitability to PCs in some form, though the timetable might alter.
To some extent, there was always going to be some shade-tree techno-geeks cobbling together some form of system for their own purpose. To my mind, there's a certain inevitability to PCs in some form, though the timetable might alter.
Society co-existed with the PC and simple cell phone without taking down major parts of the retailing and newspaper network. As far as I am concerned, smart phones are causing a more fundamental shift. I picked up the local newspaper. There were no want ads for used cars.
Garrison
Donor
As far as computing goes I would guess the situation of the 1980s persists, lots of competing manufacturers with different languages and layouts. Without a unifying DOS structure PC gaming remains every bit as fractured as console gaming and over time as technology advances there's less room for indy developers as they can't afford the costs of porting games to multiple formats. Removing the internet has such massive social implications for the development of the 21st Century I'm not sure anyone can adequately imagine it.
Imagine it remained at the nineties-level; relatively slow. The current system where textbooks and all reference sources go on line does not happen. You freeze society at the 2003-2004 level.
Garrison
Donor
Which impacts news gathering and reporting, social interaction and politics to a massive degree and frankly takes you into topics that wouldn't be appropriate for post-1900.
marathag
Banned
Those were cool for the time. While I was at Sperry in the '80s, had one of those 6000? at Functional Test, where they could run tests and burn in on the logic and memory boards for the 11/90 Mainframes before final assembly.
They used removable platter packs for their top loading washing machine sized hard disk drives, each platter assembly was 10 Meg, IIRC.
One of the few non-Sperry Computers in the place
The alternative to the PC and the distributed internet was the computing environment imagined in the 1960s. Homes would have a terminal hooked into a centralized mainframe. Computing and messaging would be done in large centralized data facilities. The French developed such a system - Minitel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
These systems were text based not graphic. No one saw this as a weakness because they had no concept of the power of a graphics based system. The cost in resources of graphics was too high at the time to even consider.
Personally I see the watershed moment as being when Sun Microsystems came up with the slogan 'The Network is the Computer' The concept that you could seamlessly connect and integrate small computers on your desk with large computers, each performing a particular function and all working on a common filesystem was groundbreaking.
These systems were text based not graphic. No one saw this as a weakness because they had no concept of the power of a graphics based system. The cost in resources of graphics was too high at the time to even consider.
Personally I see the watershed moment as being when Sun Microsystems came up with the slogan 'The Network is the Computer' The concept that you could seamlessly connect and integrate small computers on your desk with large computers, each performing a particular function and all working on a common filesystem was groundbreaking.
Hey since we are talking computer history you need to step back to the 'daddy' of the VAX system (VMS was simply the most popular operating system that DEC had for it) The PDP 11. I started my 'real' computer career on a PDP 11/70 (the largest model). We ran it on split shifts. It ran a DEC operating system called IAS (predecessor to VMS) in the morning and at lunchtime we swapped out the Disk Packs (a 256 mb platter stack in each of two Washing machine size RP06 disk drives) and ran a very early version of UNIX in the afternoon. Booting it involved toggling 16 separate switches to load an address into memory. You did this 4 times in succession to give it the starting address. One wrong switch and you had to clear memory and reload. We were lucky in that we had CRT terminals (DEV VT-100 clones) many locations used teletype machines as the input output devices. Everything was line oriented. You formatted documents with macros at the beginning and entered and edited the document line at a time.
Until I retired I still used the UNIX ed line editor on a regular basis. Tools like grep (global replace), awk (a pattern matching program), sed (stream editor) and a few others were very powerful for processing large amounts of text. And there were the Emacs disciples. The holy wars between the two were ongoing. I wouldn't be surprised if vestiges of some of that code is still buried within the huge systems that monitor all the Internet traffic today.
Grep. I remember that😀. When you had to define the directory you really understood the way the system worked. Of course even without windows a mouse makes life much easier.
I wonder if we just get earlier kludgey versions of touch screens.