This article describes how would history go if the advent of computers occurred decades before it did in OTL, with the Internet being invented in the year 1925.
Early inventions[]
SMC-OS 1.3, an early 1929 British operating system.
In the late 1910s, after the end of World War I, the first personal computers developed by British scientists were introduced to the public. They were sold as a new, efficient way to organize text in folders and files, as well as turn them into paper documents (since they had a printing system included). They were very expensive when first introduced to the market, with only rich people using them. But the curiosity about the new machine grew so much that the price fell substantially in the first half of the 1920s. In 1925, an Austrian engineer named Franz Breuer created the first communication network between computers, the Wien Super-Netzwerke (Vienna Super Network). It initially worked only in the Austrian capital of Vienna.
The Great Expansion[]
Vienna soon became the most technologically advanced city in the world, even more than London or New York. The Viennese people could communicate more quickly now: they could send instant text and voice messages in a few seconds with the advanced computers connected to the Wien Super-Netzwerke. Also, websites were first created; they had many different types: digital newspapers, discussion forums, encyclopedias, company sites and many others. The great computer network soon spread throughout Austria, connecting about ten million Austrians and changing its name to Das Große Österreichisch Netzwerk (The Great Austrian Network). It made the other powerful nations of the world wish to have a similar technology. German Austria quickly regained its economy due to several agreements involving the trade of online network technologies. In 1931, German Austria was the richest country in the world. During these times, Austria had the beautiful scenery of old streets summed with the modernity: the Great Austrian Network, which brought education and several social interactions to the general public. After the wide trade of the newly discovered technology, countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Italy, Norway, Brazil and Australia adopted similar systems in their respective regions. But each country had its own system. The great union of all the world's networks would occur some years later.
The great fusion of networks took place in 1933 and was inaugurated with a great party in Vienna. It received the name of Weltweites Netzwerk (International Network). After that event, long-distance contact through letters became quite unusual in the world, since communication was much more commonly performed by e-mail. It is also notable that the monitors were black and white at the time. Digital watches became common throughout the 1930s. The use of radios decreased a little. It was also common for cartoon celebrities of the time (such as Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat) to be seen using computers and the internet in their films.
World War II[]
Since the publication of Hitler's Mein Kampf and the foundation of the Third German Reich, the controversial politics of this newly formed realm became very suspicious. Many authors have consequently written books about the possible threat to humanity that Nazism would be. As a result, many Europeans immigrated to other parts of the world much earlier than they did in OTL. The Allies were also better prepared because of the digital inclusion. However, Nazi propaganda on the Internet was also very common in the 1930s and 1940s. With the end of World War II in 1945, the summed death toll was around 30 million (not 72 million as in OTL). Also, after the fall of Nazi Germany, Vienna was in ruins and the economy of Austria dropped again. From then on, the Weltweites Netzwerk was renamed to Internet and no longer was believed to have a "cradle"; it was instead considered a world heritage.
1950s[]
During the Cold War, the dispute between the United States and the Soviet Union, online propaganda of both socialism and capitalism played a very important role.
In the early 1950s, full-color monitors came out together with the television.
In 1956, computers and the Internet were already present in virtually all lives in the world. Computer games have also become very common in the 1950s, with the early color monitors. The transport of voice became as fast as the transport of text. The Internet expanded along with the television during the second half of the 20th century.
Music styles such as Rock 'n' Roll and derivatives never arose because the internet made social classes closer to each other; both popular and formal artists played classical music and jazz, characteristic rhythm styles of earlier decades.
1960s[]
The 1960s were a decade of revolt against the Internet. In 1962, the use of computers and the Internet in schools was approved but in the following year, series of public demonstrations by hundreds of people occurred in various places around the world. They supported the idea that the use of computers and the Internet was damaging people's health and social abilities, and they protested for banning it. In an attempt of responding to the riots, governments created campaigns encouraging people to worry about other things besides computer and television. In 1960, the global number of people who regularly accessed the Internet was 47%. It dropped to 39% in 1966 due to the campaigns. In the late 1960s, letters had an important return as a result of these protests. In 1969, the arrival of the first American astronauts to the moon, an event widely watched in the Internet and television with an audience of over one billion people, made the percentage of internet users increase a bit and later stabilize.
1970s[]
Due to the success of the Internet, the Soviet Union could expand communist and Russian propaganda to more countries in the world. In 1972, nations like Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica were socialist countries just like Cuba. Southern African countries like Moçambique, Angola, Botswana, Swaziland and Zambia also had a great Russian socialist influence. The second half of the 1970s was an era of job opportunities to junior artists and performers. Many people showed their artistic talent on the Internet, and got jobs in capitalist countries. The fight against the Internet continued. Many Islamic countries such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia banned all Internet access at this time. But liberal countries like the Netherlands encouraged their citizens to use its online services. In 1979, all anti-Internet political parties were publicly attacked, which significantly reduced the number of protests.
1980s and 1990s[]
From the early 1980s, online disclosures against violence and war were very common, due to the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was the only nation with its own Internet system, which was popularly labeled the Sovinet. After the Perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union, the Sovinet was dissolved as an independent system and joined the global Internet. The number of protests against war and socialism in the late 1980s was immense. Until 1996, most socialist and dictatorial regimes were overthrown. A new era of peace, democracy and capitalism came that year.
Unlike in OTL, most neutral countries during the Cold War became part of the First World, due to the fastest disclosure of ideologies by capitalist countries. Almost the entire American continent (except the socialist part of the Caribbean) was considered First World before 1980. From 1996, there were numerous predictions that the Millennium bug, Y2K, was about to come. People became scared before 2000, but it was not mainly for religious reasons like in OTL, but because of the great confusion that Y2K would cause in digital systems in the entire world.
2000s and beyond[]
Y2K, the Millennium bug, actually happened on January 1, 2000. Millions of people had negative balances in their bank accounts. Specialists initially believed that the bug would be completely fixed only by around 2060, but it happened in 2010 with very hard work.