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A Middle Tech Society Without Access to the Net
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(12-04-2017, 05:57 AM)Cray Wrote: 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.
OA Wish list:
  1. DNI
  2. Internal medical system
  3. A dormbot, because domestic chores suck!
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RE: A Middle Tech Society Without Access to the Net - by Rynn - 12-09-2017, 08:55 AM

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