If you traveled back in time to 1975 equipped with a modern laptop...
alexjerez.net
alexjerez.net
If you knew you were traveling back in time the most useful thing you'd bring there isn't the laptop with its capabilities but of course the information on it would be world-changing.
I'm not talking about stock prices or anything that foolish - since your time travel event would make the future from that point on uncertain again - but imagine someone bringing Wikipedia back to the seventies. Or better yet, research papers and engineering documents!
Personally, if I was unexpectedly transported into the seventies with my laptop, the amount of useful information would probably be limited. But even the (comparatively) few things on it could change the world dramatically. The most pressing concern would be data durability though, so the first order of business should be moving the data off the device onto contemporary media.
It would probably take drastically longer to offload/convert the files than the expected time-to-failure of the hard drives though, I'm guessing at least one order of magnitude longer.
They'd McGuyver it somehow. Display the information and take photographs? Synch a cine-camera to a screen paging through information? While simultaneously squirting information out a port.
> Rank Death toll (estimate) Event* Location Date
> 2. 650,000–779,000 1976 Tangshan earthquake China July 1976
> 5. 230,000 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami Indian Ocean December 26, 2004
> 6. 229,000 Typhoon Nina—contributed to Banqiao Dam failure China August 7, 1975
> 7. 160,000 2010 Haiti earthquake Haiti January 12, 2010
> 10. 138,866 1991 Bangladesh cyclone Bangladesh April 29, 1991
I think about this scenario sometimes, probably won't be able to live with myself without trying to lessen the deaths.
Contributing the science is a small precision strike with somewhat predictable consequences saving people you don't know is a mixed bag it could have good consequences or it could have negative consequences and in ways you could never have predicted.
The aim of a time traveler should be to keep as low as a footprint as you can and keep it positive or another time traveler may just have to come back in time to kill your ass to prevent your recklessness.
That's something i've always been bothered with : suppose that you'd be teleported,naked, to ancient greece, how could you prove to them that you come from the future ( provided language isn't an issue). In my case, the only thing i could came up with were maybe some basic notion of how the human body works, biologically. But that's very thin. I know a bit about general relativity, quantum mechanic, physics, logic, etc. But i'm in now way sufficiently advanced in any of those subjects to prove or demonstrate anything to anyone.
More readable on boingboing link http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/04/15/time-travel-cheatsh...
Unless you build chips for a living it's very unlikely you could build anything to the level of a laptop from today not to mention you need to build the lab/clean room to manufacture the chips.
Technically if you know how the chip worked you could reproduce it with 1975 tech but it would be as large as hell.
The best thing you could do is guide their research in the right direction since you already know the way and you could get them there quicker.
- No cell phone network, so no UMTS/EDGE/LTE connectivity
- No Wifi
- No USB peripherals
On the laptop
- No RS-232
- No Thinwire Ethernet jack
- No modem jack
So, not a very useful thing to have back then, you couldn't connect it to any printer (not that there were a whole lot of consumer-grade printers back then) or storage. You could use it to replace a compute center with the size of its SSD, but then, no way to connect it to any network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler
Also making a USB->RS232 adapter using 1975 tech should be possible (if you had the skills).
With the high bandwidth of a modern audio port you might even be able to make an audio->RS232 adapter and avoid the noise of the acoustic coupler.
Sure, if 1975 was the same as Idiocracy. Otherwise, you'd have a bunch of brilliant people going to this man from the future and his fancy gadgets and trying to figure how they worked and what society is like in the future.
EDIT: My two year old laptop does have a modem... is it still modern?
You'd have better luck using the soundcard than the RJ11 jack.
There's a big difference between accidentally traveling back in time with only your laptop + dev environment while you're typing at Starbucks and intentionally doing it.
If accidental, I don't think the cached text or HTML contents of my MacBook's filesystem would be that terribly helpful in predicting the future (though having modern source code would be interesting, and of course there's the hardware itself). My own knowledge of the last few decades would likely be more useful.
If intentional and I have some time to prepare, then I can show up with Wikipedia, stock prices, racing results (Back to the Future got this right), scientific papers, etc. Wikipedia compressed is only ~9GB as of Feb 2014. Perhaps then find some relatives and convince them I'm legit.
To offer proof of time travel, describe future events and publish the uuencoded checksums-with-nonce in an NYT classified ad in advance. Both checksums and uuencoding existed in the 1980s and they certainly could have existed on the Unix boxes of the 1970s (maybe they did). Signing with a private key would work after 1976 in the public literature, or 1973 for GCHQ, but would probably be a bit too obscure for easy verification for another decade or so, barring disruption of the timestream.
Plus you wouldn't accidentally buy a Betamax.
Now that's a lot but let's assume our theoretical laptop from the future could be assumed to be indestructible and we could rig up I/O for it, etc. without any danger. Are there fundamental problems that we could solve using it that were simply way beyond 1975 technology?
Maybe some crypto in use at the time by the USSR. (Possibly. I don't know enough to comment intelligently.) I'm not convinced there were broader scientific problems that this singular laptop would move significantly closer to solving quickly.
The technology used to build the laptop would be more interesting than using it. Even if we lacked the tools to build the tools to construct 2014 ICs etc., the laptop would reveal a lot about architectural choices and directions, i.e. you can't really drive CPUs above 3GHz or so; you go multicore. (I assume smart semiconductor engineers could figure out that sort of thing from the physical device.)
A. Pre loading the laptop with data. (A book on how to make a laptop has more value than a laptop, so this isn't allowed)
B. Diverting from the question ie you obviously have total amnesia other than how to use the laptop.
Trying to beat going to a superpower and selling it to them. They couldn't fab the silicon for generations still I guess but they probably would get amazing ideas.
Also the software would be copyright free and advanced. The C compiler I assume would have some cool incites. Similarly if they know it's from the future(?) they could just accept standards without screwing around.
You might be able to use it to pawn the stock-market. Hire a mathematician. Since we are not being silly and using current information I'm unsure if mathematicians back then could just use addition processing power to make money? This might not work.
You could crack a lot of encryption for years, a good black hat team might be able to monetize this.
Spitballing - Easy to photoshop(gimp)images, blackmail ability? Illegal and easily caught so.... Use it on the stockmarket? Guess this is kinda possible today, possible to even print it back then?
I'd guess most value is in the algorithms on it. Patient troll your way to m/billions.
Create the open source movement in a time when there is no dominant, entrenched, competitor. Try out a timeline where an OSS operating system arrives before its commercial competitors in the late 70s.
Also need to find Chuck Peddle and tell him to either avoid Jack Tramiel or not to quit Commodore.
My first thought was that that this was the perfect time for 8-10 year of a ton of 6502 based home computers coming out and dominating the home computer market. And I know 6502 assembler... And had a development environment more advanced than anything they had. And the knowledge of what would be popular.
And when 1985 comes around, I have a version of AROS sitting on my laptop, that while still not a perfect reimplementation of AmigaOS at present, could still boot and run on Amiga hardware... And would leapfrog several years worth of OS development. And I'd have ten years to go through it and make changes to make it more amenable to e.g. memory protection. The big question at that point would be: Snap up Amiga before Commodore had the chance (assuming the timeline was not ridiculously altered at that time), or let them go ahead, but try to prevent Commodore's ridiculous face plant.
But in the meantime, I'd have until 1980 to prepare an alternative to MS-DOS and prepare to try to get into IBM at the right time and try to undercut/prevent Microsoft from getting the deal...
Maybe you could invent the Web early, and "do it right".
Probably could load the laptop with games and buy some MSFT stock, that's probably the best bet.
Then I'd start buying stock and lottery tickets. Then once the internet was invented I'd start leaving odd time traveller hints across the web so those guys who recent ran that study about internet time travellers could then have some positive results.
My first priority would be to obtain an identity. Assuming I know when and where I am travelling to I would travel with the details of someone who had very recently died who suited my purposes and would take over their identity on arrival before any death certs are issued and social security records were updated.
I'd be hoping for interesting software :)
Well, you could make things quicker but you'd still be limited by the hardware of the time. The big thing would just be being in before certain things were made - so as to fix the problems with them before they became as entrenched as they are now. The internet with decent routing, always on encryption.... Public private key distribution built into the browser. Email that's not a horrible cludge protocall - that sort of thing.
But a lot of it is down to knowing what is possible. E.g. we know internet access via late 70's level home machine is possible with a few KB for a trimmed down IP stack and SLIP (because it's been done by now).
We know the basic concept behind the www. Creating a trimmed down web that'd be feasible to make available by 1980 would not be all that hard - it's not really a hardware/speed problem, but about maturing ideas (e.g the basic ideas had been around since at least Vannevar Bush's Memex idea, published in 1945; and in more fleshed out forms adapted for computers since the 60's).
You'd be limited by networking. Or rather, primarily by uncommon it was. But by the early 1980's, non-internet systems like GameLine, Quantum Link etc. that were to become America Online, started appearing. Arriving with the knowledge that the internet would become dominant, and even a rough idea of how internet protocols works, and the knowledge to go seek out people that could help you with the appropriate standards etc., you could get into that market years before, and be in a much better situation by e.g. being prepared for TCP/IP and the web becoming dominant.
I'd show them this video: http://vimeo.com/71278954
With this depressing state of mind, new research would just slow down instead of speeding up.
No seriously, I think I'll bring all the information referred to the environmental damage we created since then, plus the information required to understand the technology of the laptop itself, including some peripheral, an ethernet cable and a second laptop.
If I landed in nineties instead I would be rich thanks to Apple and Google stocks, and mostly bitcoins.