Of course I’d still have a computer. There are still games and things, and word processing, and shtuff like that.
Also, before there was an World Wide Web, there was (and still is!) Fidonet, carried on “BBSes”. Kind of like message boards, but like, mostly with a text
interface and like.
Ooh yes I would. I used a PC at work for searching online databases like those of Dialog and Datastar, then I bought —ooh -----very posh ----a little Amstrad, which I then found useful at home, then went back to university, where it was useful for essays etc. oh but I would hate there to be no internet :(. Hell, in that case I might even take up watchign telvision agian. OR, more wisely stop being a hermit and join the world again, I suppose 
In the days before the Internet and wide-spread local availability of Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, and Genie, I ran my own BBS. It was called the Metro Meteorologist. I had a shortwave receiver and a 75 bps packet-modem(!) that I would use to download wefax images from Offut AFB, WLO, and a few other places. 25 minutes for a gray-scale IR image, 15 minutes for a b/w isobar map, and 7 minutes for the hourly ASOS dump by morse code. That was my subscription content ($5 per month). This was in the days where there was only 1 GOES satalite with a working imager, and 137Mhz LEO polar orbiter tracking was still expensive to come by (now, mosFET amps and yagis are easy to get ahold of, so active tracking isn’t an issue any more).
The problem was, for the sam reason I couldn’t get AOL et al without long distance charges I also couldn’t get more than 2 dial up (14.4kbps) lines for my overclocked 8086 (back in the days where you overclocked by changing the frequency crystal). But the pros and the hard core amateurs in my area were appreciative of the service.
Yea, BBSs back then even had “joke” command.com replacements that that would insult you every time you entered a command, flipped your screen upside down, all sorts of crazy stuff. I haul one out every once in awhile for my students to troubleshoot.
How much did you pay for your hand-held scanner? I paid $300 for mine. I also paid $300 for a BocaRam 32Mb EMS board. Would have cost me $1000 to fully populate it with 41256 chips, but I got lucky and bought a pallet full of government-surplus TRS-80’s for $5 that I pulled the chips out of instead. I haul that one out for the students to configure also (with the 5.25 inch driver disk, no less – they spend more time trying to hook up the floppy drive than actually getting the card to run).
Damn right. Need one for the job (graphic design) and me own art. Grew up with an Atari ST, and there werent no interweBB then I tells thee.
In fact, its only in the last 2 weeks I finally got internet at home - used the works one before - and I have 2 Macs for the purposes described above. Don’t really play games - I find it easier to collate scripts for my books together from sketchbooks notepads and bus tickets on a word processing program etc.
Most definitely. I’ve had a computer of one kind or another for the last 20 years - I can’t imagine what my life would be like without one. At first it was just games, mostly, (I was a kid!) but then my father introduced me to the world of BBS and I was hooked - the original online addict 
But even when I haven’t had internet access, I’ve used my computer, and I definitely would have one regardless.
But that’s a horrid, horrid thought that I’ll thank you never to bring to my mind again
Nope. I have a computer specifically for the internet and while I use its other features too, if I didn’t have the web as a resource, I wouldn’t care to have any of the other things.
Sure, typing up a letter is easier than writing it out but I would still be typing 12 WPM instead of 60 if it weren’t for five years of practice while surfing the web. And while I do like playing games, I’m mostly a console gamer… the only PC game I’ve ever played and really loved are the Civilization games, which have been released to various consoles (where I actually discovered them) before so I wouldn’t even miss them either.
I just wouldn’t have any special use for one any more so why have a $500 paperweight?
I’d still want to have a computer even if the Internet ceased to exist. I’d still want it for games, word processing, spreadsheeting, music, just like I still do now and did before the Internet. Now that we do have the Internet it wouldn’t be as much fun to be without it, but I’d definitely sense a big void in my life if I didn’t have a computer at all.
What about turning the crank that’s in front of the computer??
I remember it well.
My all time favorite computer was a 286 with monochrome monitor, 640KB memory, and 40MB HD. It ran DOS. Ah, the command line! @!#$%^ mice! Down with Windows! Down with color! I regret that the Straight Dope doesn’t have a text only interface.
My first modem was 2400; I thought I died and went to heaven when I got the 14.4. No web, just dial up to local boards. Then there was FIDONET access.
Damn straight I’d have a computer without the Internet.
If computer technology had improved in quality and speed and lowered in price exactly the way it has, but there was no internet, I would still want one. With the right software, they are a recording studio in a box. That’s what I always wanted - the means to record music for a lot less than it costs for a real studio.
I work in an industry that has largely moved from being totally analog to totally digital, so sure, it would have been necessary for me to learn to use computers, or I’d have to find another line of (much less interesting!) work.
Mine was a 300, on a Commodore 64. 
I was on QuantumLink for a few months, until they started charging for seemingly everything. Then it was strictly local BBSs, I found my first one though the Yellow Pages and they had a list for all the others in the area.
I probably still have my Tandy 2400 around somewhere from when I finally got a 16-bit computer.
Sounds familiar.
I wish I knew what happened to my nifty little Timex-Sinclair 1000 - the first computer that was completely mine. The C64 was family community property. Then my dad gave me his old 64 when he moved up to a 128, and I got my first modem - bought with my own money. 1200 baud, baby, bought it at Toys R Us. I remember when the 9600 came out, thinking “There’s no way it can get any faster than this.”
HA! I can top you 1200 baud. I swear there was a strange “portable” thingy only for nline searching that I had to use at work for a while (in a blooming government office, woudl you believe?!) that had the speed of300 baud :eek:
Soon got a reasonable PC though, all praise to the Invisible Pink Unicorn (well, it was an Agriculture/Fisheries Dept., and even kept some Guanaco so why not unicorns?)
Absolutely. Dave needs one for work. I also was a computer person before the mainstream internet, and used it at least once a day.
Of course. I wrote a book chapter on a C64, with a crappy word processor on a cartridge.
But this was not before the internet. There was an internet long before civilians got on it. A good internet, where if you didn’t know a path from your machine to the person you wanted to send mail to through decvax, ucbvax or ihnp4, you shouldn’t be sending the mail. (That meant no spam, folks.) Where my business card had regular expressions on it. When there was one, low volume, alt.sex newsgroup.
Domain addressing was the end of real computing. Feh on @, bring back “!” (pronounced bang for you children.)
I’d probably still use it for DVDs, word processing, PC games, and console emulation. But I got into a lot of these things based on stuff I’d found on the internet. Would I, for example, still have a computer for ROMs if didn’t have a way to download them from the internet?
Absolutely. A better question would be, “If there were no SDMB, would you still pay for internet access?”
My answer to that is a resounding “maybe.”
Well, I guess it is true that without email, a computer would be useful in writing letters.
Absolutely. I had computers before the net, and got a lot of use out of them for wordprocessing, game playing and storing my family history research.
I must admit, the idea of there being no internet makes me feel a bit panicky and anxious. What on Earth would I do without it? My need for movie trivia would go unfulfilled if it wasn’t for the IMDB, and without the SDMB I’d be back to living in a world where people who like to read and know things are considered both freaky and geeky.