Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
How possible is it for humanity to achieve a similar technological level, basically everything we have today including high-end computers, without internet ever introduced or even considered, except for small scientific/government local networks?
If that's possible, what would be the obvious and less obvious consequences?
The Internet is so good that as long as it's possible, it will be created. There are two plausible reasons for not having Internet, and they both depend on external conditions:
DARPA invented the concept of computers networked across a large geographical area. They promptly realized how powerful such ability could be in the hands of the enemy, and immediately banned any kind of macro-scale networking, whether cable or satellite based. Only the military is allowed to have such a power, and they never develop it beyond early warning systems. Even ham radio feeds configured to broadcast 1s and 0s are shut down by goons in suits.
This is essentially a broad category covering a few scenarios:
As to the consequences, there's really only one possibility:
A regular ol' truck has a pretty good bandwidth if you fill it up with terabyte hard drives. In the London of days gone by, mailmen made deliveries multiple times a day, allowing gentlemen of letters to carry on a conversation with one another. A bustling courier trade would emerge between individual networks, ferrying data that was mere hours or days out of date. So forget DoTA, but you should be able to get a decent chess-by-email game going.
Suppose the Soviet Union 'won' the Cold War. The entire world is run by the Supreme Global Soviet. It is not very hard to imagine this world getting to modern technology levels with a few decades of us, yet there being no internet at all (except for government and laboratory networks, as you indicated).
Given a dicatatorship's desire to control the media, I would consider this 1984 scenario to be extremely likely, if liberal democracy were ever to disappear.
Suppose that the events of Terminator came to pass in the 1990s, but that we humans won. In addition to setting us on a path to a Dune-like anti-transistor future, I would consider it highly likely that networked computers would be strictly forbidden.
It would happen, I think that it would just take a bit longer. Aside from increasing the speed of collaboration, the "internet mindset" has increased the expectations for speed in our culture.
There was computer communication before the internet. For anyone old enough to remember it, we had BBS nets with file sharing, forums, and mail protocols like FIDO and usenet. Individuals with a bank of modems would set their computer up as a server. Then you would upload your files or messages to that server. Once a night (usually), that server would then call another server and send its files there, eventually getting to its destination. Because of the timing of when the servers would call each other, it generally took 3 days to get a message from the west coast to the east coast of the US and 1 day to get messages going in the other direction (note the times may be reversed, I'm relying on memory).
So, collaboration could and did happen. I was on a number of anti-virus, networking, and science fiction forums at the time. We solved problems together but it took longer. If you needed speed, you overnighted a floppy but that didn't happen much. People were OK with the pace. For one thing, you had time to compose your message and make sure that it said what you wanted to say.
Video conferencing would still happen but it would be much more expensive and the quality wouldn't be as good. However, it would work for large company/university collaboration.
To answer the "how" question, it would just take longer. If you want it to take the same amount of time, I recommend having a war. War always spurs tech growth. We have the lasers that power our fiber optic networks (and many other things) because of SDI (the Strategic Defense Initiative or the Star Wars Program as it was called).
[Edited to get the name of SDI right.]
If you are thinking about no www and only LAN (local area network) people would expand their LAN to friends/neighbors and so on. There is a country in South America where INTERNET was prohibited, and the locals started to run network cables across streets and so on, they created an completely different kind of network and had their own services running. Even something like Netflix, WoW servers, web pages and even a search engine only for a city.
Sorry but forget the name of the country.
You couldn't have tech the same as ours without networking. Internet is just a form of networking, therefore something along those lines would develop.
It would be like having phones but no phone networks. Cripple the internet today and huge amounts of businesses, governments, etc,. would be affected immediately and whole departments would cease to function. International trade and logistics would fall to bits.
If there was never local area networks apart from small govt and scientific ones. We wouldn't have the tech advances we have right now. The Western World is driven by money. You just took away a major revenue source and importantly a major communication medium.
