De Forest

In 1951, after spending considerable amounts of money and manpower, Bell Labs gave up on the idea of replacing vacuum tubes with a device exploiting the theoretical, but thus far impossible to attain, properties of semiconductors. Decades later, the world has forgotten such efforts, and instead keeps finding innovative ways to shrink vacuum tubes a few 10ths of a millmetre every few years. Indeed, in 2021, the first portable electronic calculator, weighing only a pound and just slightly larger than a paperback book, went on sale for a mere thousand dollars.

On the alternate tagged De Forest (after 'Tubular' was rejected, and 'Gernsback' held back for someplace much cooler), semiconductors and related materials simply do not work as they should, at least not in any way that can be used to create transistors and their kin. Computers exist, and remain as immense machines filling large, temperature controlled rooms, or sometimes, entire floors of office buildings and sub-basements at the Pentagon. The vacuum tube technology has exceeded that of Baseline considerably, but is still far less efficient than even the earliest transistors.

There is, of course, no Internet. No transistor radios. No digital watches. No flat screens. No cell phones. Science and engineering have marched on in most other areas; man walked on the moon by 1995, albeit only the once, and after multiple failed attempts by the US, the USSR, and China. Many jobs eliminated by cheap computerization remain; secretarial pools are a common feature in any business (and few executives can use a typewriter). Print shops abound in the abscence of desktop publishing and laser printers. Newspapers thrive. Movie monsters are men in rubber suits; all special effects are 'practical'.

Of course, without cheap computer assistance, it takes longer to do anything. Even the simplest CAD programs require multi-million dollar machines; few businesses use them. Technology is most areas has progressed more slowly than on Baseline, and in different ways. Cultural change has likewise slowed.While fashions and styles shift, the slower pace of communication, the greater difficulty in spreading ideas, and the persistence of old patterns of production and consumption have all served to hamper social progress. The USSR has not collapsed, though it has become progressively more market-oriented; China remains firmly Maoist, and has absorbed Taiwan and Hong Kong. Japan and Korea have become powerful centers of new tube-based technologies, and their innovations have led to some miraculous consumer goods, on par with the first generation of transistor radios.

As with many worlds with "unexplained" physics, Breach's main interest here is scientific, hampered, as usual, by the fact few of the "modern" items work on Baseline. De Forest seems to have hit what some dendriphysicists call a 'functional shift' in the early 1960s; that's roughly the point where the things they did with vacuum tubes broke limits of Baseline physical law. While this is of course fascinating to anyone interested in pure science, when discussing budgeting, one of the generals in charge of making such decisions was quoted as saying "So, y'all are tellin' me, we should stick one of our... what was it Ah see heah, a dozen? One of our twelve electronics geniuses who can go to any of these damn worlds they want, we let them spend a few months, maybe a year, to maybe, and Ah do note, maybe figure out how to make a portable radio like we had in the fifties, only it'll weigh twice as much and be half as useful? When we got places out there with laser guns and flying cars we could be studying? Is that, indeed, what y'all are tellin' me?"

Funding for in-depth local study was not approved.

World Type

Alternate Physics, Alternate History

Divergence

1940s for technology shift, the Big Bang for physics.

Current Year

2023, but it could pass for 1975 if you squint.