We Are Not Time Travelers

I've heard this argument made about a person time-traveling back to, say, the year 1000. You would be so cut off from the infrastructure you know and depend on, and so i'll-prepared for the alien culture you landed in, that your knowledge of the future would be useless.

But 1975? That is taking it too far. I was alive in 1975! It was different from today, but not so different that you couldn't figure it out.

Yeah, you might be hard pressed to build an iPhone. But do not underestimate the awesome power of hindsight. The great thing about hindsight is that you know which ideas are likely dead ends and which are likely to pay off. Just knowing, say, that mammalian cloning is physically possible would make it a lot easier to do. You know that if you keep trying the reward is out there.

I think a lot of web technology could have been built earlier if people had only known it was worth building.

The best approach would be to write a book, comic book or novel "predicting" this stuff. In 30 years or so you'll be recognized as the most accomplished 'futurist' in the history.

Oh I almost can hear the interviews:

-- How did you managed to describe the exact interface of the iPhone more than 30 years before its release ?

-- Well, I actually came from the future.

-- LOL! Let's make sure you don't get anywhere near the LHC then.

I dunno, the idea of open-source software and good interpreted languages would get you pretty far. I wouldn't mind being Larry Wall - and I'll bet at this point I could re-implement Perl from memory pretty well.

A decent knowledge of things like unit testing could also make you pretty damned effective in the then-burgeoning market of custom software. You might be able to pull a Google or a Netscape with a small team you hired from your consulting profits.

With a decent knowledge of what tech was coming down the pike next year or so, I'm pretty sure you could do pretty well any time back to 1975 or so.

Beyond that, I'd need research, because I didn't live through it - but if you know which year you're going for, check the patent database for anything invented about five years later than your target. That takes you back to the 1700's.

Further back than that, you're talking about agriculture (crop rotation, for instance) or stirrups or something. Give me a target year and six months of prep time, and I'm virtually positive I could put together a killer business plan that would leave me or at least my children owning the world.

Surely being a patent troll is the ideal business model for a time traveler? No need to go to the bother of actually selling any products, just patent things you know will be wildly successful, wait until the right time and then unleash your lawyers.

I think the problem here is that these are mostly incremental improvements of things that were already around in 1977, at a fundamental technical level. It wouldn't be so hard to "invent" the transistor in 1900, for example.

But the transistor, the thing that makes most of these gadgets possible, was already around in 1975, its only that people have gotten so damn good at making them by now. This happens through a long series of small improvements.

Same would go for other tech... Not so difficult to build a battery or a steam engine in any age really, but making it highly efficient as we know it now, different story.

I find it fun to think back to the 1970s and try to guess which products would get bigger and which products would get smaller..

eg (UK-centric list, maybe):

* TVs - they were supposed to get smaller, they're huge now

* HiFi - bigger surely, and they did for a bit during the 1980s ("when you die they'll bury you in it")

* Womens' cars - are now bigger than mens' cars by far

* Men's underpant - bigger

* Women's underpants - smaller

etc

You might not be able to change the world but time travel can certainly make you rich. Just buy some stock from Intel, Microsoft, Google and Apple.

>Someone besides me has fantasized about bringing modern tech to the past.

Many, many, many times over the decades. Anybody remember Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". Or more recent movies like the one around 1980 about the USS Nimitz going back in time and keeping Pearl Harbor from being totally destroyed.

I think the simplest way to use a computer in the pre-PC era to profit would be to apply the computational power to calculations that nobody else could afford to make - so things like stock trading could be very exploitable, as you would be applying arbitrage methods that the market literally could not keep up with.

If your intent is to accelerate research, on the other hand, obvious candidates would be CAD systems and simulations. A lot of lighter/cheaper machine designs have come from finding better minima of cost/weight/strength, and microprocessors themselves are beneficiaries of CAD technology. If you're in the pre-industrial era, being able to transport back blueprints of modern designs would still be of benefit, even if the economy isn't ready for all of them.

I think you'd need two to have an impact in ww2 for crypto purposes..

On a side note: I'm glad you mentioned that there's an HP-48 emulator available for Android, because somehow I'd never thought to look for one and now I'm in nerd heaven.

If by "my handy hp-48 emulator" you mean to say you're the one who wrote it, then thanks and mad props; this is fantastic.

What would you do with a Nexus One, without a GSM network or without the Internet? By itself it's pretty useless.

I don't think you can say someone is "appropriating" the style of a modern artist by virtue of using the general design aesthetic of the late 1970s. I followed your links and I don't see any particular borrowing beyond the general idea, which can hardly be said to belong to anyone in any sense.

The 1970s belong to us all†. For better or for worse.

(†: Certain aspects of the 1970s may not be available until 2065 or later, assuming no further modifications of the copyright act. Consult your representative for more details.)

I remember real ads in similar style (for a Commodore machine!) from the mid 80s, much less the 70s.

Commercial pluggery is not usually one of my hobbies, but you might want to take a look at what the good people at HeadRoom offer: http://headphone.com/

I like Grados myself, but anything beyond the '60s needs more amp than the players have built in (and the crossfeed makes a huge difference if the recording wasn't originally binaural). No need to go overboard unless you are a can fanatic and have a better source than an iPod (or other portable); the AirHead/BitHead is better than you can imagine. Bonus: the BitHead is an excellent USB "sound card" as well.

Oops that was meant to be 'definately wasn't started by time travellers' obviously!

No, they're computer graphics (some elements are "verbatim quotes" from other items in Alex's portfolio, like the LED spectroscope on the 'pod), and no, that doesn't mean they're easier than, say, a one-off airbrush & pencils piece. Except, that is, that once a model has been created, it can be manipulated and duplicated (as in the six-Laptron "star").

It looks like there was a lot of back-and-forth between something like Illustrator, Photoshop and (probably) 3DSmax (the hooks to the Adobe stuff make it a good workflow tool). The lighting and shaders are well beyond anything I've ever been able to do, but there are little -- really tiny -- mistakes in some details (physical dimensions of real-world things us old folks are intimately familiar with that kids wouldn't notice) in his work that tell me these aren't physical mockups (the way we used to do it in the good old days). Still, there's a lot of work represented here.

Fashions come and go. Why are Apple compelled to use clean, aluminum and glass based designs? Why did the Web 2.0 crowd use rounded corners and gradients? Styles come and go. Most don't look particularly confusing at the time - just in hindsight :-) (Yep, current products will look out of date and retro in 2025!)

Because the fake wood paneling and wood-grained contact paper was cheap, ubiquitous and (trust me on this) looked better than the equally prevalent pink-n-purple color scheme. To wit, the PDP-11/45: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jef/422559909/

Because Faux-wood panelling is awesome. I've got a faux wood faceplate for my XBox that is love.