Seen inevitable. ARPA was sending packets to and from remote computers in like the 60s. What is absolutely mindblowing really.
Packet radio and dial-up BBSes were around before the commercial internet as well.
Dial-up BBS must have been wild. My mind would have been blown by it, you mean I can shitpost with these people not in the same room?!
I remember my father rambling in the mid 90s about how amazing chat rooms were because he could talk with people all over the country or even overseas, although that's into the commercial dial up internet era and after the dialing up a specific server era.
I was big into chat rooms on aol. We didn't get internet until I believe 99, so way past the heydays of BBS.
It depends on what you mean by “the internet”. The specific configuration of systems that we have today isn’t inevitable, but in any universe where there are computers and a reason to connect them together, there will inevitably emerge a system that interconnects them, and there are strong incentives for both individuals and the system as a whole to be interconnected and interoperable. My answer is “probably, but not necessarily exactly as we’ve built it.”
as a protest against pop culture trends im doing "there is no multiverse" posting. and in the one singular universe which we exist in, there is a world where internet was not invented:
this one before the internet was invented
In the yodelverse people communicated from mountain ridges by yodeling. In this case they eventually automated yodeling machines to connect the continents and PYD (personal yodeling devices) where people yodel memes and media content.
If multiverses exist - then some of them don't have the net. There was WW III. Or there was a mass die off from something militarized like smallpox. There was enough of a die off and disruption to stop the march of technology.
But if the earth isn't a dystopia - I don't see how the internet or something similar doesn't get invented.
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Edit
In some multiverses some tech is forbidden. Like this silly tv series where they don't have the net or any broadcasting tech.
In a postapocalyptic world approximately 500 years in the future, war has left civilization in ruins. Some elements of technology, such as electricity and ground vehicles, have survived the apocalypse, but society now shuns firearms, leading to a reliance on melee weaponry and crossbows.
Any world with any form of telecommunication probably makes it inevitable. Text pages use basically no bandwidth.
While it could look a lot different, like being more optimized for large files at once without interruption, like with token ring. But I think network theory as a branch of math is inevitably going to be figured out by someone clever enough.
This is a fun question. I think to get to an internetless computerized world, you have to imagine a world where mail doesn't exist, which is a very difficult scenario because you have to get to a place where an industrialized, electrified information-age economy is established without anybody writing something down and sending it via courier. There might be room for a voice-only internet if we skip letter-writing/telegrams and go straight to the telephone, but that's also tough to imagine.
I think there are worlds where the internet is never commercialized, and we wind up with a future where access is much more constrained, but that requires a very different USA, and a very different DARPA, or some other geopolitical reconfiguration. I don't know about the specific ideology that lead to the opening up of the internet in the USA, but if it never standardized, it's possible that some of those early internet conglomerates could have relied on their proprietary protocols to create entirely separate IBM, AT&T, etc. networks.
Technology is not a straight line. It's driven by dialectics like everything else. Computers were not something we were destined to make, nor was electricity. Our world could be entirely nomadic hunter-gatherers still with some alternate hinge points.
Yeah there are a lot of worlds out there where the fundamental constants aren't fine-tuned enough for the contents of the universe to form like we know them to have formed in our universe
I think some of them don't have internet
