10 Modern Technologies That Almost Turned Out Differently

We like to think technology follows a straight, inevitable path: geniuses invent, markets adopt, and boomsmartphones in our pockets, GPS in our dashboards, streaming on every screen. In reality, modern tech is a chaotic choose-your-own-adventure story where we just happened to pick this timeline.

Behind almost every gadget and system you use today, there’s a scrappy rival, an abandoned prototype, or a controversial policy that could have nudged history in a totally different direction. If a few committee votes, corporate board meetings, or presidential directives had gone the other way, you might be watching movies on HD DVD, typing on a Dvorak keyboard, and navigating with a deliberately fuzzy GPS that’s off by a couple hundred feet.

Let’s dive into 10 modern technologies that almost turned out very differentlyand what our near-miss tech history can teach us about innovation, power, and the weirdness of human decision-making.

1. Smartphones: We Could Have Been Living in Stylus World

The Fork in the Road

Long before the iPhone made multitouch cool, there was the IBM Simon Personal Communicator, released in 1994. It combined a mobile phone with PDA-style features like an address book, calendar, email, fax, notepad, and even a sketch pad, all driven by a monochrome touchscreen and a stylus. Only about 50,000 units were sold, and the device disappeared after a year on the market, but it’s now widely recognized as the first true smartphone in history.

Because early “smart” devices were stylus-driven, business-focused, and bulky, it was easy to imagine a future where smartphones stayed nicheused mostly by executives, field workers, and hardcore nerds. Consumer phones might have remained simple, with separate PDAs for productivity. Instead of a unified app ecosystem, we might have ended up with fragmented platforms for calls, productivity, and entertainment.

The Timeline We Got

Once full-color screens, mobile internet, and capacitive multitouch landed, phones went from “portable handset” to “primary computer.” Operating systems like iOS and Android built massive app ecosystems, and the idea of carrying a separate music player, camera, map, or planner became laughable. The surprising part is not that smartphones took overit’s that for a while, the market seemed content with clunky keyboards, resistive screens, and stylus taps. A few more years of hesitation, and smartphones might have remained business tools instead of the center of everyday life.

2. The Internet’s Plumbing: OSI vs. TCP/IP

The Fork in the Road

Today’s internet runs on the TCP/IP protocol suite, but for a while there, it wasn’t obvious that this would win. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) pushed the seven-layer OSI model as a universal networking standard, aiming to get all vendors and telecom companies on the same conceptual stack. Meanwhile, TCP/IP emerged from U.S. defense research and was already in practical use on ARPANET and early multi-vendor networks.

For a time, the world faced a genuine “protocol war.” Governments and telecoms flirted with OSI, which looked more official and neatly structured, while actual working networks increasingly ran on TCP/IP, which was messy, pragmatic, and, crucially, already deployed.

The Timeline We Got

TCP/IP ultimately won because it worked, spread quickly, and shipped in real systems. OSI never fully caught up in real-world adoption, though it remained influential as a teaching and conceptual framework. If OSI-based stacks had prevailed, the internet might have developed more slowly, with heavier bureaucracy, more closed vendor ecosystems, and fewer fast-moving open-source implementations. Instead, the messy-but-open TCP/IP world gave us the rapid growth of the web, startups, and the “move fast and break things” culturefor better and worse.

3. Electric Power: The AC vs. DC Showdown

The Fork in the Road

In the late 19th century, the “War of the Currents” pitted Thomas Edison’s direct current (DC) system against alternating current (AC), championed by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. DC was simple and already deployed in early urban grids. AC, however, made it easy to step voltage up and down and transmit electricity over long distances with fewer losses. The battle got uglycomplete with public demonstrations, smear campaigns, and not-so-subtle PR stunts involving electrocution to make AC look dangerous.

The Timeline We Got

AC ultimately won the distribution war, becoming the backbone of modern power grids. But imagine the alternate world where DC had stuck: we might have had smaller, local power plants in every neighborhood, more limited transmission distances, and much slower rural electrification. Ironically, high-voltage DC is making a comeback today for long-distance transmission and renewable integration. In a sense, AC won the 19th-century war, but DC quietly regrouped for a 21st-century sequel.

4. Home Video: VHS vs. Betamax (and a Very Different Movie Night)

The Fork in the Road

In the 1970s and ’80s, Betamax and VHS battled to become the standard for home video. Betamax had better picture quality early on, but VHS tapes could record for longer, eventually offering up to four hours per cassettejust right for recording entire movies and sports events without swapping tapes. Manufacturers, video rental stores, and movie studios gradually aligned behind VHS, lured by that convenience and a more open licensing approach.

The Timeline We Got

VHS became the dominant standard, shaping how an entire generation experienced movies at home. But if Betamax had been cheaper, more widely licensed, or quicker to match VHS’s recording time, you might be nostalgically rewinding Beta tapes instead. The lesson: “technically better” doesn’t always win; “good enough plus convenient and well-marketed” often does.

5. High-Definition Discs: Blu-ray vs. HD DVD

The Fork in the Road

Fast forward to the 2000s, and we got another format war: Blu-ray versus HD DVD. Both used blue lasers to cram high-definition video onto discs. HD DVD had a big advantage in costit was cheaper to manufacture using modified DVD production lineswhile Blu-ray offered higher capacity and plenty of studio backing. For a while, it wasn’t clear which logo you’d see on your movie cases a decade later.

The Timeline We Got

Blu-ray ultimately won, thanks partly to Sony bundling Blu-ray drives with the PlayStation 3 and major studios and retailers throwing their weight behind the format. HD DVD was quietly retired after just a few years. But the real plot twist: by the time Blu-ray “won,” streaming was already sneaking in through the side door. In a different timeline, HD DVD might have won the disc warand still been steamrolled by Netflix and broadband.

6. Keyboard Layouts: QWERTY vs. Dvorak

The Fork in the Road

The QWERTY keyboard layout dates back to 19th-century typewriters, allegedly arranged in part to reduce jamming by spacing out commonly used letter pairs. Decades later, August Dvorak designed an alternative layout that put the most common letters on the home row and tried to maximize hand alternation to increase speed and reduce strain. Dvorak advocates still swear it’s more ergonomic and efficient.

For a moment, especially when typing classes and office training were big business, it seemed plausible that organizations might adopt Dvorak to increase productivity. There were even studies and advocacy campaigns pushing for it as the “scientific” layout of the future.

The Timeline We Got

QWERTY never budged. Network effectsshared training, printed keycaps, software defaultskept Dvorak on the fringes. Most modern operating systems let you switch layouts with a couple of clicks, but the vast majority of users never do. In an alternate universe, kids would be hunting for the “QWERTY” option in their settings the way we now hunt down Dvorak.

7. GPS: From Military Secret to Everyday Lifeline

The Fork in the Road

The Global Positioning System was originally developed for military navigation and targeting. For years, the U.S. kept the most accurate signals for military use while deliberately degrading civilian accuracy through a policy called Selective Availability. Civilian GPS worked, but it was fuzzygood enough for rough positioning, not great for pinpoint navigation.

After aviation disasters and growing demand, access slowly opened up. Key policy decisions in the 1980s and 2000s made GPS freely available for civilian use and eventually removed intentional signal degradation, dramatically improving accuracy.

The Timeline We Got

When Selective Availability was turned off, GPS accuracy improved overnight, enabling turn-by-turn navigation, precision agriculture, location-based apps, ride-hailing services, fitness trackers, and more. If the signals had stayed degradedor if access had remained tightly controlledyour phone might still show your location as “somewhere in this several-hundred-foot circle.” Location-based startups, logistics optimization, and even dating apps would look very different.

8. The Web vs. Gopher: A Less Clickable Internet

The Fork in the Road

Before the World Wide Web took over, Gopher was a serious contender for how people might browse online information. Gopher organized content in hierarchical menus: you navigated servers by drilling down folders and lists, almost like a global file system. It was structured, predictableand kind of bland.

Early advocates had to choose: stick with Gopher’s tidy menu-driven approach, or embrace Tim Berners-Lee’s Web, built around hypertext links, embedded media, and a much more flexible (and chaotic) structure.

The Timeline We Got

The Web’s ability to link documents across servers, mix images and text, and evolve with new standards made it explosively popular. If Gopher had stayed free of licensing controversy, or if its model had evolved faster, we might be “browsing” today by stepping through neat lists of options instead of surfing messy, ad-filled pages. The modern internet might feel more like a global intranetfunctional, but a lot less wild.

9. Electric Cars: The EV1 That Vanished

The Fork in the Road

In the late 1990s, General Motors launched the EV1, a sleek electric car available via lease in a few U.S. markets. Drivers loved itquiet, quick, and emissions-free. But GM decided the car wasn’t financially viable at scale. The company ended production, reclaimed most leased vehicles, and famously sent many of them to the crusher. The move sparked public backlash and inspired the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?

The Timeline We Got

Electric vehicles eventually roared back thanks to advances in batteries, climate pressure, and the rise of dedicated EV makers. But if GM and others had leaned in instead of pulling back, mainstream EVs could have become normal a decade earlier. Urban air quality, oil demand, and even geopolitical dynamics might look noticeably different today. Instead, we got a long pauseand then a sudden EV renaissance.

10. Search Engines: AltaVista vs. Google

The Fork in the Road

In the mid-1990s, AltaVista was one of the most powerful and popular search engines on the web. It indexed a huge portion of the internet and handled hundreds of thousands of queries a day when that was a massive feat. But as the web exploded, search quality became the differentiator. AltaVista drifted toward being a cluttered portal with ads and extras, while Google arrived with a brutally simple interface and a ruthlessly effective ranking algorithm.

The Timeline We Got

Google’s PageRank-based approach made search results feel almost magical compared to the noisy results from earlier engines. Users migrated quickly. AltaVista faded, was acquired, and eventually shut down. If AltaVista’s leadership had doubled down on relevance and clean design instead of portal sprawl, the phrase “Just Google it” might never have existed. You might be saying, “AltaVista that” insteadand your online privacy debate might be focused on an entirely different tech giant.

So Many Near-Misses, One Big Lesson

Looking across these 10 stories, a pattern pops out: technology doesn’t “naturally” pick the best option. It picks the option that wins in a messy mix of timing, politics, business models, regulation, network effects, and plain human laziness.

Betamax was arguably better than VHS in picture quality. Dvorak may be more ergonomic than QWERTY. Gopher was tidier than the early Web. And yet, here we arerewinding VHS tapes in our memories, mashing QWERTY keyboards, surfing a chaotic web, and watching Blu-ray get sidelined by streaming.

The upside is that our current tech world isn’t a carefully engineered masterpiece; it’s a series of lucky breaks, regretted decisions, and second chances. That means there’s room to improve and to question “the way things are” without assuming they’re inevitable. A lot of what feels permanent is just what happened to win the last round.

Bonus: Living With Almost-Tech – Experiences & What-Ifs

To really feel how close we came to a different tech reality, imagine living your everyday life in some of those alternate timelines.

You wake up and check your phoneor rather, your “personal communicator.” It’s thick, monochrome, and absolutely insists you use a stylus. The device can track your contacts and calendar, but downloading new apps means swapping physical cards or connecting to a computer. Most people still use basic flip phones for calls and texts; “smart” devices are mainly for managers and power users. Mobile gaming is a niche hobby, not a global industry.

Typing out an email at work, your hands fly across a Dvorak keyboard. It feels smooth and efficientmost letters live comfortably on the home row. Touch-typing training in school drilled this layout into you, so when you travel abroad and encounter a rare QWERTY keyboard, you feel as lost as a tourist staring at a sign in an unfamiliar alphabet. Online forums are full of tips for “transitioning back” to QWERTY when you move between regions, much like switching between different mains plugs today.

When you drive across town, your car’s navigation system can’t quite agree where you are. Your GPS location jumps within a broad circleclose enough for highways, but not precise enough for tight city streets. Delivery drivers rely heavily on landmarks and local knowledge; ride-hailing apps are clunky or nonexistent because “the location’s just not accurate enough.” Running apps can only tell you “about three miles” instead of 3.07.

Movie night looks different, too. Maybe HD DVD won, and the logo on your player is bright red instead of Blu-ray blue. You shop for discs with that format in mind, and friends complain about owning the “wrong” kind of library. Or maybe optical discs never really took offeveryone stuck with VHS a bit longer, and streaming didn’t explode as quickly because broadband infrastructure was slower to develop in a more fragmented tech landscape.

Online, the internet feels more like a giant corporate directory. You don’t “surf” from site to site as freely; instead, you click down nested menus in a Gopher-like system, moving through categories curated by institutions and big companies. There are fewer rabbit holes, fewer personal blogs, fewer chaotic comment sections. Some things are calmer. Others are much harder to discover unless they’ve been blessed with an official menu entry.

Even the car you’re driving might feel like a relic. Without the painful early shutdown of projects like the EV1, maybe electric cars became normal in the late ’90s instead of the 2010s. Charging stations would have quietly spread along highways and in city centers, long before smartphones and apps made them easy to find. In that reality, complaining about “range anxiety” in 2025 would sound as outdated as complaining about dial-up.

Thinking through these experiences highlights a big point: our expectations about “normal” technology are incredibly fragile. The idea that maps are always accurate, that search is instantly relevant, that power comes from faraway plants, and that phones double as cameras and walletsall of that could have been delayed, reshaped, or replaced if a few key decisions had gone differently.

The good news is that we’re still making those decisions today. Battles over privacy standards, AI regulation, proprietary ecosystems, interoperability, and open data are just new versions of VHS vs. Betamax, TCP/IP vs. OSI, and AC vs. DC. The next time you assume “of course it’ll go this way,” remember: history is full of almosts, and the future is still very much up for grabs.