[thrash]

The biggest changes come as you pass through the realm of networked computers (cyberpunk) into networked people (transhumanism). Traveller (again, meaning CT) had no formal character rewards or experience point system, and no knowledge skills (sciences, scholastics, languages, etc.). The line between player information and character knowledge was muddier than later generations of rpgs. Much of the flavor of Traveller adventures -- both implicitly and explicitly -- comes from having incomplete information about the universe and setting out to explore.

The Universal Planet Profile was an aspect of this: deliberately sketchy and potentially unreliable or out of date, a party of characters might find something quite unexpected at the worlds they visited. The rewards for playing through Twilight's Peak or Secrets of the Ancients were almost entirely about what the characters learned in the process (though there were one or two token physical prizes, they weren't overwhelmingly useful or lucrative).

Contrast this with a universe with ubiquitous, networked computing. Yes, the FTL drive means that data packets get older the farther away they originate, but one could send entire updated Wikipedias for each world on a remotely plausible Xboat network and still allow players to short-circuit all kinds of adventures by Googling them into irrelevance. The referee then spends an inordinate chunk of prep time figuring out Yet Another Reason this simple approach won't work (much like transporter problems in Star Trek).

On the communication front, if interstellar messages are more like videograms than telegrams, it becomes much less plausible to rely on random strangers who happen to be available (i.e., player-characters) rather than recruit appropriate experts from surrounding systems. Most of the random patron encounters then go out the window.