As email was secretly winding back for the death blow, companies like Ascom Communications and Pevco Systems were envisioning a "high-tech" world where fax machines and telephone calls were replaced with elaborate in-office suckage conduits. And thanks to shiny new computer technology that allowed flow trackage and braking systems, it seemed like this $50 million industry was only getting started. As Wired prophesied, entire neighborhoods and cities would someday be entangled by a literal series of tubes reaching every household -- the likes of which would dwarf the once-thriving underground pneumatic systems of New York and Paris. That's right: Imagine if, instead of sitting down with your laptop, you relied patiently on an embedded wall chute to tell you the latest movie times and deliver such fine articles as "6 Celebrity Telegraphs That Backfired Horribly."

Although this steampunk vision of the future ultimately failed to come to fruition, the irony is that the technology's intended evolution looks surprisingly familiar. Specifically, the historical assumption that giant pneumatic plumbing would someday be used to transport people.

Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge
Someday we will achieve mass dead goldfish travel.

Welcome to 1990, and the dawn of bulky pager wristwatches. As we approached the new millennium, the paging industry seemingly had nowhere to go but up -- as projections placed over 33 million beepers in our pockets by the year 1997. As the president of the then-largest paging company, PageNet, heartbreakingly put it in 1993: "This is a very exciting time for the paging industry."

Dallas Business Journal
*cough*

Turns out there's very little need for a $300 wristwatch that uses radio frequencies to tell you when to drive to the office and check your voicemail. In fact, with its bloated, techy design, one of the biggest logistical problems was simply that most people didn't want to replace a fashion accessory with something that could just as easily fit in your pocket. Because only an idiot would base an entire product launch off of Dick Tracy comics.

Fortune
With a dash of Futurama.

So what was the future of communication if mobile phones never made it? I got two ridiculous sing-songy words for you:

Chicago Tribune
"Yes, we are calling World War II technology 'the future.'"

Aw, yep. Until being utterly dominated in the industry, there was apparently a time in which the electric two-cup-and-a-string system considered taking on mobile phones as the leading source for on-the-go communication. That means there's a parallel universe somewhere out there where Jack Bauer is battling terrorism and poor range quality. And speaking of TV ...

The excruciatingly-slow-rollout promise of Google Fiber has teased a distant utopia in which humankind has cast its bonds from cable television and flown free into the shimmering arms of Netflix and/or the desperate, gropey tentacles of Hulu. It's almost sickening to imagine what television would be like without the internet to take it down a notch -- but it turns out that it's not so different than this very moment, if you imagine this very moment as being immensely frustrating.

Microsoft
"Let's lay it out like a normal keyboard, which people are familiar with, but put it
in alphabetical order because we're Microsoft."

This is WebTV, a Microsoft-bought concept that nearly went bankrupt before it was even launched and limped along for a surprising amount of time before ultimately being rebranded and shelved. And, keep in mind, it still required the internet to exist. Rewind back to 1994, and Time Warner was cooking up an internet-free, bulkier turd called the Full Service Network -- which cost $4,500 each and resembled a rain-damaged mini-fridge.

Time Warner
"If you think you're frustrated with your service now ..."

After two years of preparation and development, Time Warner unleashed 4,000 of these terminals into a neighborhood in Florida. Their purpose? Everything from ordering Pizza Hut to playing shitty video games to receiving coupons and tickets via an attached printer next to your television. There was even a 3-D "interactive mall" for users to shop while immersing themselves in abominable '90s graphics of equally abominable '90s mall architecture. Despite having the decorative appeal of a severed horse torso, the Full Service Network was so freaking cowabunga that the L.A. Times published an article telling people they'd be stupid not to invest money in it.

And had an alternative not come along, they would have been right -- as multiple companies were working on this same advanced TV concept.

Apple
Apple
"Your power switch, channel buttons, and volume control have all been
needlessly consolidated into a single, internal toggle switch. Enjoy."

Everyone say hello to the Apple Interactive Television Box, a precursor to Apple TV and yet another contestant in the sad, internet-less race to ultimately nowhere. Like its counterpart, the mid-'90s system was tested in 2,500 homes before disappearing a year later -- and somehow this isn't the most embarrassing attempt from these future innovators ...

Apple
They could only be expected to ride the Apple II Oregon Trail bundle for so long.

That's fucking correct: For over two grand you could be enjoying a computer that not only plays CDs but can double as a cable box! TAKE OUT A SECOND MORTGAGE NOW!

In what sounds like the working title to a dystopian young adult film, "the last book" refers to an MIT project using digitized ink technology to create a simulated bound novel with contents that can be electronically changed. So instead of the obvious Kindle-style tablets we have now, these were conceptualized as full-sized books with individual microchips on every page. Because, according to one of the scientists, having a single screen would cause you to "lose your previous page." While that sounds amazingly dumb today, keep in mind that trying to design an ebook in the 1990s is like trying to design TruckNutz in the 1790s. And then, someone else at MIT was working on this:

MIT
"Now your neighbor can steal newspapers from all over the world!"

Yup, there was a project called Fishwrap that used databases to create a personalized, "made-to-order" newspaper that students could then print out to read like regular papers. So in that brief and hilarious window, the future of reading was either traditional books printed electronically or electronic words printed traditionally -- which means you'd be likely reading this on the grimiest e-magazine in the history of bathroom entertainment.

Plain and simple, those fools thought they were too big to fail. By 1992 they had begun to explore international markets and purchased 236 record stores in the U.S. And like the music industry they were so eager to penetrate, their arrogance had completely blinded them to the obvious crest forming in their wave of overpriced Captain Ron VHS rentals.

NY Times
"They're much harder to smuggle out under your shirt," explained one strategy director.

Their plan was this: Start setting up computerized kiosks in video and record stores. Customers would then walk into the store, press a few buttons, and a DVD or CD would be burned with the newest movie or album of their choosing, which would be spat out of the machine along with a case and printed cover art. This was the grand vision of how the internet would be harnessed, and the ironic misfortune was that they weren't wrong. This is how we get our media now ...

Amazon

iTunes

And if you consider -- even for a second -- feeling bad for these dumpster clowns, keep in mind that, had this newfangled process come to be, it would have steadily decreased the cost of manufacturing albums and movies while keeping the consumer cost exactly the same. Just ask all the way-cheaper-to-make CDs they arbitrarily priced higher than records in the 1990s. Because, like CD stores and Blockbusters, the entire music industry was one big Saddam Hussein statue waiting for a jaunty topple ...

Look, piracy wasn't exactly a consumer revolution. In fact, thanks to file-sharing programs like Napster and BitTorrent, your average fleshy money-bag is not only less willing to join the capitalism dance -- but flat-out believes they are entitled to free shit. But while the music industry probably didn't deserve the total abandonment that came from file-sharing, they sure as shit helped cultivate it at the same time. For example, let's go all the way back to 1987 and meet a little-known format called the Digital Audio Tape:

Sony

The DAT Walkman was the digital solution to skipping CDs -- designed to have superior quality while being compact and durable to take on jogs. What a great idea! Too bad the record companies were currently gushing over its discy, hard-to-pirate predecessor and opted to entirely bury this format instead. That's right -- because DAT were easy to duplicate, this better-quality alternative was shelved in the early '90s, right around the same time the music industry was hastily creating anti-piracy laws that would ultimately bite them in the ass.

This, my friends, was the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 -- a law that required manufacturers of digital recorders to compensate copyright holders for any potential piracy their product would cause. The irony? Since no one saw home computers as a "digital recorder," this act would go on to be the pivotal defense for Napster some eight years later. For those of you wondering, here's the record industry's projected sales for a world where Napster didn't exist:

The Hollywood Reporter
"Everyone knows that all businesses go up forever and ever."

So, yes -- while it's true that Napster and the internet totally effed music sales, that royal dickery was in direct partnership with the industry's own reluctance to innovate. Don't believe me? Gander at the once-anticipated future of home audio:

Find Icons
I'm pretty sure that logo is the brand of the Antichrist.

If you're wondering why that just looks like a CD with an extra logo, that's because it fucking is. They're called Super Audio CDs, and back in the '90s they were the next big format jump ... if you count lateral slumps as a form of hop. Unlike those Digital Audio Tapes, Super CDs turned out to have nearly zero sound quality difference from regular CDs, making them a harrowing reminder of the stagnant wreckage that digital music yanked us from. And speaking of herky-jerky motions ...

That's Penthouse Interactive -- the '90s replacement for the dwindling peep-show industry that features a woman in a plain environment following virtual commands. Other, more ambitious games like the apparently popular Interactive Adventures Of Seymore Butts would take nerdy innova-bators on a sexy choose-your-own-adventure tour of the forest or Los Angeles.

Penthouse
There's nothing people love more than swapping DVDs in the middle of cranking it.

But while this is all retrospectively hysterical, the truly insane consequence of a world where humankind was never brought online actually exists behind the soggy curtain. Back in the dawning of the new millennium when the internet was just budding and the porno industry was bigger than literally any other form of entertainment around, making up to $14 billion annually. That's more than any sport, film industry, or every performance art combined. About 700 million porn videos and DVDS were being rented annually, and companies like Playboy and Penthouse were diving into the pay-per-view and digital markets. The result? An industry that was quickly consolidating into less and less individual companies and partnering up with cable operators like AT&T and Time Warner. As one consultant at the time predicted, "In the future there will be fewer than 10 global players."

So there you have it: Without the internet, there's a very good chance that getting your rocks off would be bigger than Disney and probably involve navigating cable TV fees. At least in this timeline it's just the people on the screen getting fucked.

King Lawrence/Getty Images
And porn occupies only a third of our day, which we can all agree is healthy.

David is an editor and columnist for Cracked. Dig his cool vibes on Twitter, you punks.

Also check out 5 Reasons The Internet Could Die At Any Moment and 4 Awful Ways The Internet Is Tainting Everything Else.

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