What If: Computing went Big Iron?

Premise: In the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of microcomputers was laughed at, while in the Soviet Union, Victor Glushkov managed to push through his plan for a national computer network built around a system of computer centres. Apple never got funded, Commodore went bankrupt trying to compete with Texas Instruments, and America and the rest of the world went with the multiple-access computer center rather than the PC; most such computer centers in America were developed by public-private partnerships.

What might the social ramifications of a world where personal computers never developed, and instead computing went the way of the Master Computer?

Edited by Ramidel on Jul 10th 2018 at 8:14:15 AM

Do government and large-scale private services have to share the network with private users? The security must be a nightmare.

In America, there are firewalls and smaller networks that don't connect to the bigger network (in places where you can fit a computer centre that you want to airgap), but yeah, that was one thing I was thinking. Big mainframes mean that anyone who knows how to input swordfish may be able to get root access on any poorly-secured system.

Actually, never mind the security issues - the thought of the latency alone is horrifying.

Does this alt-Internet practice a cloud computing equivalent of sorts, i.e. shared, non-localised data storage? Must be inconvenient to have huge amounts of data regularly turned inaccessible or even wiped out by inconvenient power outages.

I've played around with the Master Computer concept as well, but that was in a Bio Punk setting that relies on a magical synthetic nerve tissue phlebotinum and uses a lot of fantasy tropes, so not sure if any of the ideas are transferable.