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.
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.
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.
How would the world look if the computer was invented instead of the steam locomotive?
