A Middle Tech Society Without Access to the Net

[Rynn]

If you're looking for examples, MANY "space opera" settings written prior to the 1990s rarely addressed large area computer networks. From Foster's Humanx setting to Asimov's Foundation to Pournelle's Codominium and Niven's Known Worlds, information technology often had mighty computers and AIs but scant vision of anything like the Internet.

I've been reading a Greg Egan short story collection this weekend from the early 90s. Most of the stories are set early-mid 21st century and the lack of internet is extremely noticeable and in some cases makes for a quant story. Like how in one a detective goes to collect encyclopedia CDs from a local library for research.

[Drashner1]

It gets even stranger if you start reading stories by Heinlein and others from the 'Golden Age' of SF or thereabouts.

A common scene in many stories is the use of slide rules - to do calculations to get numbers that are then fed into a computer.

Heinlein's book Have Space Suit, Will Travel spends a lot of time talking about how hard it is to manage a space suit when you can't really see your feet or the ground right around them. The main character spends a lot of time thinking about how he wants to design suits with chin windows. This can seem very strange given that modern space suits (or even those used during the Moon landing and such) have big bubbles on the front that look like they should give a very wide view. Until you realize that when the story was written, space suits hadn't been developed yet and (from the picture on the cover of my copy) the space suit looked a lot like a deep sea diving suit with a little rectangular window...

Science, as they say, marches on.

Todd

[JohnnyYesterday]

What's especially humorous about that is fishbowl-helment spacesuits predate that story by at least two decades. See the pulp art by Frank R. Paul.

[Vaktus]

So how about a society on the periphery that has become a dictatorship that only uses the net for government purposes? Anything approaching a civilian internet would be stifled immediately? 

I just came up with an idea that perhaps since their is no access to the internet, maybe they would incorporate large amount of devices into their bodies? 

look forward to your thoughts.

[Duddy9]

If you're looking for an example of scifi design without the internet. I'd recommend the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. The set designers designed the ship without any networked computers. The In-universe explanation for this was to prevent infiltration by enemy AI.

I suppose one explanation for the society you described, is that they previously had an incident with rogue AI, and since then they have designed redundancy into their IT infrastructure.

[Rynn]

If you're looking for examples, MANY "space opera" settings written prior to the 1990s rarely addressed large area computer networks. From Foster's Humanx setting to Asimov's Foundation to Pournelle's Codominium and Niven's Known Worlds, information technology often had mighty computers and AIs but scant vision of anything like the Internet.

Sorry to pull the thread back to this but I’ve spent the last several hours on a train and re-read the first foundation book in that time. When I was a teen and read it I found the primitiveness of the setting quaint: citizens of the ten millennia old galactic empire (supposedly founded 40,000 years after the development of atomic power) still read physical news papers and transfer data on microfiche. But it dawned on me that given the entire premise is the galaxy is stagnating and regressing perhaps the dawn of the empire did have technologies beyond our wildest dreams (like a hyper-mega-super-internet) but they’ve lost it.

Silly thought but one that put a very different spin on the anachronisms.

[iancampbell]

If you're looking for examples, MANY "space opera" settings written prior to the 1990s rarely addressed large area computer networks. From Foster's Humanx setting to Asimov's Foundation to Pournelle's Codominium and Niven's Known Worlds, information technology often had mighty computers and AIs but scant vision of anything like the Internet.

Sorry to pull the thread back to this but I’ve spent the last several hours on a train and re-read the first foundation book in that time. When I was a teen and read it I found the primitiveness of the setting quaint: citizens of the ten millennia old galactic empire (supposedly founded 40,000 years after the development of atomic power) still read physical news papers and transfer data on microfiche. But it dawned on me that given the entire premise is the galaxy is stagnating and regressing perhaps the dawn of the empire did have technologies beyond our wildest dreams (like a hyper-mega-super-internet) but they’ve lost it.

Silly thought but one that put a very different spin on the anachronisms.

An even more extreme version of tech that's incredibly advanced in one direction but pathetic in the other might be the Lensverse. They do have computers, but there are humans (admittedly not many) who can do better than them at calculating. OTOH, they have access to staggering amounts of raw power. Tactical FTL, in both movement and weapons fire. Weaponised stars, and ships that can generate a significant fraction of stellar power output - by total conversion. Planetary masses of antimatter used as weapons. Almost casually moving planets. And generating wormholes (or something very much like them) with reasonably small amounts of equipment. Between universes, even.