You mean ithe internet without Tim Berners-Lee and the WWW? It’d be probably mail, file share and bulletin board systems. (And Usenet.) And probably fewer people on it and a greater percentage of companies, academics and students.
Certainly many others would have tried to invent something like the web.
HyperCard predated the web browser and had the concept of easy to build pages that linked. Lots of people were working on ways to deliver apps over the Internet.
I think in some alternative timeline we’d still have a lot of interactive content on the Internet somewhat like the web, but probably based on different technology. Maybe more proprietary.
True. Thanks for the info about HyperCard. I just read up on the history of hypertext on wikipedia. And I didn’t know the exact history. I mean the question was, what if the WWW hadn’t been invented and not what if it was invented by somebody else and had a different name and architecture. So I didn’t include that in my answer. It’s certainly a product of its time. People were looking for a way to organize information and publish it on the internet. And Tim Berners-Lee didn’t come up with the whole concept of hypertext. Seems the concept was already there and libraries and people have been indexing and cross-referencing information before. It took someone to come up with the architecture and invent the markup language and the protocol. But it’s not that far fetched. It would probably have been done by somebody else if things had turned out differently.
I sometimes wonder how things were and felt back then. FTP is originally from 1971, TCP/IP was developed during the 70s and early 80s and they switched to the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) in 1983. SMTP (mail) was introduced in 1983, the NNTP (news) specification is from 1986, HTML was proposed in 1989 and the first browser being developed in late 1990, HTTP was introduced in 1991 and SSL was published in 1995. These are still around as of today (in revised, newer versions) and powering our world. There certainly also were precursors, competing and replaced technologies. So a lot of standardization happened especially during the 80s. In the early 1990 home(?) computers and storage got cheaper and more widespread (personal computers have been around since the 70s) and modems faster so more people could join the online services of that time. Other important tech of the early days that didn’t make it to today in their original form probably include UUCP, FidoNet, the whole dial-up BBSes and whatever ran on the ARPANET before the Internet Protocol got invented. But I suppose it was really different back then. Computer systems were big Unix machines and unaffordable to individuals. And a select few universities were connected, initially funded by the department of defense.
there were many ways to use the internet before browsers, applications talked with other applications, people joined BBSs, but you could argue that eventually, you’d like to access text or media in a repeatable manner, you’d like to be able to point to those resources in the least steps possible (some way of universally locate a resource…), those resources will end up being referenced by other resources and you’d eventually end up with the web.
the web is a side-effect of the internet
I was using the Internet before the WWW, and there was already a pretty good ecosystem from nerdy stuff to consumer-usable. Email, Usenet, Gopher, FTP, IRC, were all widely usable.
Gopher especially made a great way to index and search (with WAIS) things on multiple different services, without being a mess of text/hyperlinks/images/sound/video in a hairy ball like the WWW.
Before browsers even existed, there already was the internet. We had social media (NNTP and IRQ), online multi-user games (MUD, et al.), browsing (Gopher) and file hosting (FTP).
I was introduced to the web and the Arena browser with the words “It’s just like Gopher, but with hypertext.”
Gopher is still around, there are even some web gateways to get into it.
Browsers made the Internet usable for the general population. The Internet as we know it would have remained a network for academia, governments and large corporations. Smartphones would not have been developed. Without a reason for everyone’s homes to be connected to a high speed network, TV would remain the remit of cable and satellite broadcasting - no streaming services.
I’m not so sure we wouldn’t end up in a similar place to where we are, just through scattered applications rather than “the web” with the browser as a hub. Someone would dumb down individual services and we end up with apps.
Gopher
One of the things no one has talked about here are consumer content delivery services like AOL and Prodigy. These created some of the first Internet walled gardens, with programs created to serve these services’ content via phone lines. As consumers moved to broadband, I would expect these programs to become free and be the primary way for consumers to view content.
It wouldn’t. I don’t think it would ever have hit mass market appeal like it has now at least.
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All walled gardens, none of the democratization we know now
I think you’ve got that backwards. The early days of the web were the wild west; blogs, personal sites and forums were multitudinous. Weird, niche content was everywhere. Nobody knew what the web was supposed to be yet, so it could be anything. Nobody really knew how to make money from it, so passion rather than dollars was the motivation to create content.
Now, the web is basically a giant funnel into six monolithic corporate controlled websites (ie. Walled gardens). Enshittification has ensued and the fun has ended.
I pine for the days when you would log on to BBSes to have genuine discussions about niche hobbies and topics. It didn’t matter who you were as your only identity was your username; you could be whatever you wanted.
Now, the web is overflowing with millions of desperate, near identical 19 year olds shilling for BoredVPN while showing their arse cracks for fake internet points and sponsorship money.
Lemmy / Mastodon is the first platform in a VERY long time which has the same feeling as those early days and I really, really hope it sticks around.
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Do you know what a BBS is? Or Usenet?
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So all of the current monolithic sites would notnexist without web browsers, and things would be far more decentralised
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Do you mean if it started with apps right away instead, or how do you mean?
Not necessarily, but yes. I didn’t fill in a lot of detail for my question, but my question goes something like this in depth:
The software ecosystem is a mess right now, not just OS, but drivers, web, GUI, there’s some problems here and there, and thankfully, there’s also workarounds, and then there’s also this saying: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But that being said, stuff like these add to the technical debt, and perhaps in the future, it could implode, just like Y2K.
Of that, if we were to just cherry-pick web stuff, there’s a whole lot of conflicting standards, there’s different engines, transpilers, libraries, web frameworks, API, protocol standards, limited localization, poor accessibility, etc.
I was wondering - what if hypothetically, a small variable were to be introduced in the timeline that prevents the existence of browser and JavaScript in general? Would there have been the growth of apps and applets, that could have successfully used the internet? Perhaps the HTTPS would have never existed, because of the death of HTTP, maybe we would be using a Gopher equivalent of a browser? Maybe we could have seen solutions like Gemini and Yggdrasil? Could it have killed TCP/IP and we could have seen RINA? Would we have seen some sort of standardization? Or perhaps, would we have ended up with a population who were computer-literate and appreciated the power-user side of operating systems, like terminal browsers? Perhaps, it could have created a standardized internet experience? Maybe it could have improved accessibility? Then, what about the execution of code in general? Would we be downloading binaries, instead of loading webpages? How would it have been sand-boxed? Questions like that.
My guess is that if browsers as we know them weren’t invented, HyperCard would’ve become the first browser eventually. No idea where things would progress from there or if it’d have been better or worse than the current clusterfuck. Maybe we’d all be talking about our “web stacks” instead of websites, and have various punny tools like “pile” and “chimney” and “staplr”. Perhaps PowerPoint would’ve turned into a browser to compete with it.
If browsers were invented but JavaScript specifically was not, we’d probably all be programming sites in some VB variant like VBScript (although it might be called something different).
NNTP FTW. There was nothing more entertaining than Usenet. I loved it, really.
We’d have something similar. Maybe more fragmented like Usenet + telnet BBSes + gopher + IRC, or a closed standard like hypercard that you had to license. People want to communicate and put stuff out there to be heard, it’d have happened somehow.
Like Gemini https://geminiprotocol.net/
How would the world look if the computer was invented instead of the steam locomotive?
