I was reading a book, The Victorian Internet, which talked about how connected the Victorian era was, with wires stretching everywhere above the roads. It’s probably exaggerated, but it got me thinking. There are many ways to engage in en masse interconnectivity. Computers, of course, are one of them, but we also have had, for example, messenger pigeons, drones we can send to different places, search dogs with an interconnected sniff system (I forgot what that was called), etc.
Suppose you had a civilization. Maybe it’s on a planet whose environment interferes with the capabilities of a classic internet, or maybe it’s a normal fantasy setting where the classic internet is cursed. However, the civilization still needs some kind of apparatus of interconnectivity. What’s the best/closest thing you can think of as a replacement for the internet without it being the internet as we know it?
First we’d need to define “internet” for this purpose. Does classic mail qualify? It certainly can carry more data than pidgeons, and if you can still have computers you might get relatively close to the 90s internet by sending data by mail (especially when you’re communicating with people within a day’s travel, rather than on the other side of the earth).
Other than that, you can do a lot with visual signals. In the Discworld novels, they developed a kind of optical telegraph network with a technique that is somewhat similar to ship flag communication, and optical telegraphy exists/existed in the real world, too, though it never got much traction. If you have computers, you might be able to get pretty alright data rates with something like that.