!!!

[keshwyn]

OK, Kingsley, you got my attention! Tim Berners-Lee??

Wow. I wonder what the state of reality is *outside* the wards now, since he was the effective founder of the world wide web - but not until 1989! And since Godric Hollow happened in 1981... Actually, I hadn't thought about that before, but a lot of computer development was going on in Cambridge (UK) in the 80s and 90s, so Voldemort effectively took out a lot of ongoing world-wide development in computers when he took over.

Hmm! Food for thought.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Ha me too! I assumed things outside the wards were more or less on track with our time line but this really opened up my eyes to just how off track things are in alt....

-les who can't login to save her life right now.

[cheyinka]

That was my thought too - in retrospect it was silly of me to think that the UK vanishing out of existence wouldn't have drastic effects, but "potentially no world wide web" really made me think about how different that world would be.

[janeite]

That was me too. I had been thinking about how hard it was going to be for Britain to recover economically after essentially missing the information revolution; I hadn't thought about how Britain's absence might affect world events.

And wow what a team to help rebuild Muggle society! I wonder if there are any more intellectuals tucked away somewhere.

[synecdochic]

I'm pretty confident the WWW would have been invented even without Sir Tim -- hypertext had existed for a while and the problems he was trying to solve with the WWW would have still been around.

It's probably called something different, though!

[keshwyn]

Mmm. I partially agree. The loss of Cambridge as a center for theoretical computing probably slowed things down a fair bit, and will have impacted a lot of the underlying code.

To pull a not random example out that I hadn't thought of before Kingsley's post: one of my best friends in high school was a Brit in the US for a while, and he's one of the core developers for FreeBSD, a Unix variant that's the core base OS for MacOS X. In 1981, he was 5 years old, and still living in the UK. So his contributions to the code stack are entirely missing in the alt-verse. (He's now a professor at Cambridge.)

I think the web probably exists by 2015 in their world, but I think it took them longer to get there, and I think it looks a lot different.

[cheyinka]

I'm confident it'd have shown up eventually, but without Sir Tim and everyone he collaborated with providing eight-ish years of groundwork, I don't think it would have happened in 1989, and 2000 would have been very different without ten years of everyone's My First Website, even if the WWW had shown up by then. (insert under-construction gif here)

[aedifica]

That's the perfect icon for this post! :-)