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.

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.”

Well, back in the day you’d have a series of different services, usenet, irc, email, and for articles (at the time usually scholarly articles) you could use Gopher or follow certain usenet groups to find FTP sites hosting the docs.

So if we didn’t have a unified web browser, and those technologies advanced at the pace of other similar services, here is how I see it:

Most services would be accessed by discrete apps, one for your email, one for your chat, one for your remote and local documents.

We wouldn’t see the proliferation of siloed services, platforms like Facebook that offer all of these services but only within their subscribers. They just simply wouldn’t be able to compete with the established services or add nuance or extra value.

Discord would also likely have come into existence a lot earlier and unified some of those services, but again if they chose to silo it as they are doing now, they wouldn’t gain market dominance over already existing wide communities.

Without the profit incentive, existing services have no reason to tie their users to their platform or inhibit cross platform interactions.

Streaming services would still come into existence and fragment and silo like they are now, but that’s only because of the cost of providing reliable HD video content isn’t easily dispersed across unsiloed userbases.

Web advertisements would be non-existant but you’d still get spots in podcasts and videos.

Frankly I think it would be a better internet than what we have now.

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.

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 would only be mediated through more complex applications. We’d have open source apps like thunderbird for email, still, but most applications would be written by large companies who can afford that kind of ground-up software development.

All walled gardens, none of the democratization we’ve come to know. None of those tiny websites. No independent blogs except on closed services like substack and medium. No independent forums, just one central service that houses all of them… IE reddit. Maybe social media is even more centralized than it is now; maybe nobody manages to get a network monopoly in this world, and some communication standard pops up, a less good version of the fediverse, so I don’t need five fucking apps, but the corporations still find a way to dominate that world.

Most importantly… The hyperlink is kind of dead. I can no longer click on an Associated Press article without an Associated Press app, or an app that knows how to read associated press apps. Maybe my RSS app has a feature like that built in, but if it does, it’s bordering on browser territory. The same holds true for buying; I can’t share a link to a niche brand’s website because it doesn’t have one, and you definitely don’t have their app installed, so clothes need to be on amazon or nordstrom or not exist.

The fact that most people can’t just click on a link to see what it is means that there are fewer references between some things and other things, the web is less connected.

This also ruins search. We can search Wikipedia, but we can’t search the whole internet, because the internet doesn’t have a unified format of references by which pagerank can operate, there are no websites to crawl, and the results you find each require you to download an app to interact with.

What does all of this mean? … well, it really means that somebody would have eventually seen the need for a browser and invented it.

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.

NNTP FTW. There was nothing more entertaining than Usenet. I loved it, really.

It wouldn’t. I don’t think it would ever have hit mass market appeal like it has now at least.

The Matrix