Ask HN: You, a programmer, teleported to 1960's. how would you be a millionaire? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: You, a programmer, teleported to 1960's. how would you be a millionaire?

15 pointsheywhatupboys32 comments

With your current tech skills, in an old world of computing, could you really apply your micro-architecture noSQL skills to make big bucks?

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No idea, I guess I'd have to learn machine code, Fortran and some COBOL. That's not going to make me millionaire. I'd look for the first opportunity to code a spreadsheet in some way, even not interactive.

About noSQL, all databases where noSQL back then.

Bollocks to becoming a millionaire, I'd head to Detroit and experience the birth of Soul ...

Grow some crystals, build some counters, take on DoD contracts to run global surveys monitoring background radiation, expand the airframe fleet, do some broad area photography on the side.

That made one of my former bosses (an Australian) a millionaire several times over in the 1960s.

Hell, pretty much any Cold War era DoD contract would rain money .. and there was more going on than just weapons development, SIGINT and counter measures ran hot.

I have no "micro-architecture noSQL skills", I do have a few million battle tested SLOC's out in the field, know C, Fortran, ASM (for multiple archs), physics, robotics, a bit of electronics, wet photography, geophysics, mining, agriculture, etc.

I'd begin developing a very portable, very comfortable programming language and environment. Something akin to Pascal or Python, portable like Lua or SCUMM, less philosophical than Lisp or Smalltalk. I might not become a millionaire, but it'd be a lot of fun to start my "line of business" software development career as early as humanly possible.

caveat: computers are so slow that a compiler or interpreter for such a language would be unusable. Consider GC as well.

Yes absolutely, it'll be 5+ years before anything like this is remotely conceivable. But I'll be working on it! When it does become possible then I'll be there immediately.

Work at whatever, save every penny, invest in Xerox stock.

Patenting all basic computing algorithms and data structures that were not published yet. And add "on a network" to everything else already existing.

Maybe patenting first a few common enough practical things (I don't know, even cardboard boxes for pizzas) to have enough money to lobby legislators for accepting the big patents of above if they weren't accepted back then.

Nothing I know how to do will exist for like 40 years so probably just buy some AT&T stock and hop back in my time machine.

No but as others said, you can buy stock or buy up buildings in the high priced cities. In the 60s, no one wanted to live in the cities and all residential properties were cheap. For example, the Boston South End was very cheap until about the late 80s.

I would burn my self out trying to figure out how to program from book documentation.

Wait till the weekend IBM tried to contact Gary Killdal for an OS for their new PC, and buy Seattle Software's CP/M clone to license to IBM before Bill did. ;-)

Oh, wait, that's not noSQL skills, that's people skills.

Wait 20 years then buy stock as I start to recognize companies' names.

Win lawsuit cases from organizations and companies ignoring the danger of various radioactive materials and the like and various pollutants.

I can't see it being valuable in contrast to having a decent knowledge of which brand names become big in the 60s and 70s.

More in the spirit of the question, though, one would at least know which architectures to focus on (and I speak as an erstwhile OS/2 developer here...)

SJ said at the time, don't tell me how it works, tell me what it does, and he changed the world.

You need hardware skills, so you can at least do a 8-bit micro. After that the software can be unlocked.

The Biff Tannen way. Gambling on sports events I already know the outcome of.

These thinly veiled product research Ask-threads are getting out of hand.

To me it felt like someone was fishing for ideas for their modern adaptation of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

lmao, I was just wondering myself what skills in tech I would actually have in 1960s that was useful. As in: how much of what we believe to make us skilled is actually just standing on the shoulders of giants

Wait around until Woz and Jobs grow up. Then hang out with them.

Buy real estate in Silicon Valley. Next question.

Better get good quick at enterprise sales

Get in the tobacco business

Is it possible to invent bitcoin with 60s computer hardware?

Sure but they were smart enough to know it's a stupid idea back then /s

I understand that this topic always riles people up, but I'm still curious about the technological feasibility of the problem using computers of the time.

Since we don't know who invented Bitcoin, it's possible it was a time traveller.

"satoshi izzydata" has a nice ring to it ;)

black-scholes

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