Q:

Technologically advanced humanity without internet

How possible is it for humanity to achieve a similar technological level, basically everything we have today including high-end computers, without internet ever introduced or even considered, except for small scientific/government local networks?
If that's possible, what would be the obvious and less obvious consequences?  

A:

The Internet is so good that as long as it's possible, it will be created. There are two plausible reasons for not having Internet, and they both depend on external conditions:
Dystopia
DARPA invented the concept of computers networked across a large geographical area. They promptly realized how powerful such ability could be in the hands of the enemy, and immediately banned any kind of macro-scale networking, whether cable or satellite based. Only the military is allowed to have such a power, and they never develop it beyond early warning systems. Even ham radio feeds configured to broadcast 1s and 0s are shut down by goons in suits.
Post-apocalypse
This is essentially a broad category covering a few scenarios:

Civilization has collapsed. While modern computers still exist, we do not have the industrial base to build large quantities, nor do we know of anyone we'd want to talk to. The only existing computers are networked together, but they are basically all in the same place anyway, so the Internet is really an Intranet.
Government control beyond municipal-level has disappeared, leading to anarchy. We do not have the ability to launch or maintain satellites. We do not have the ability to maintain physical links between remote locations - bandits destroy telephone cables (like they did telegraph cables in the Wild West). Each city has its own Internet, but it's impossible to connect beyond that.
Nuclear war happened, filling the atmosphere with some nasty radiation. This radiation fries all unshielded electronic components. The sheer thickness of the necessary lead shielding makes it prohibitively expensive to run wired connections between cities, and atmospheric radiation interferes with radio and satellite signals. Cities maintain shielded technodomes of various sizes, but electronics simply cannot function in the space between technodomes.

As to the consequences, there's really only one possibility:
Sneakernet
A regular ol' truck has a pretty good bandwidth if you fill it up with terabyte hard drives. In the London of days gone by, mailmen made deliveries multiple times a day, allowing gentlemen of letters to carry on a conversation with one another. A bustling courier trade would emerge between individual networks, ferrying data that was mere hours or days out of date. So forget DoTA, but you should be able to get a decent chess-by-email game going.

