I fear it would turn out equivalent. The starting stack might have been better, but the promise of money to be made and competitive pressures would be the same. We would "worse-is-better" ourselves to roughly the same spot we're in today. Bloat, tracking and clickbait.
Whenever I implore people to cut down on software bloat, I know what I'm really asking is, "fight against the market, slow the decay down just a little bit".
Only some 30 or so years earlier, and who knows what we'd have come up with, given such an early head start?
I work in the space of dynamic language runtimes, and it hurts me to see how ideas pioneered by SmallTalk and subsequently the Self language[1] runtimes haven't yet been adopted by some of the more popular dynamic languages today.
One argument against this is that the web today is not set up for easy authoring by end users (in fact, it's gotten more difficult to "make websites" as the web has progressed). But there was a hypermedia system around two decades ago that had authoring in mind from the start — hypercard — that could have been a good prototype for a "real web".
If you have authoring as a primary consideration than perhaps one-directional, consumer oriented cultures of technology would not be so prominent. But who knows.
I doubt it. Smalltalk had coherent design that anticipated many needs that the web faces today (and computers in general). What we get in ad-hoc piecemeal additions would be an organic part of the overall infrastructure.
I fear it would turn out equivalent. The starting stack might have been better, but the promise of money to be made and competitive pressures would be the same. We would "worse-is-better" ourselves to roughly the same spot we're in today. Bloat, tracking and clickbait.
Whenever I implore people to cut down on software bloat, I know what I'm really asking is, "fight against the market, slow the decay down just a little bit".