9 ms·

Imagine if Doc Brown sent you back to the future to... 1975. You'd have to re-live the computer revolution again. You could become rich, but it'd be painful, li

by Maro 16y ago

Imagine if Doc Brown sent you back to the future to... 1975. You'd have to re-live the computer revolution again. You could become rich, but it'd be painful, living without email, then using MS-DOS 4 and eagerly waiting for Windows for Workgroups to come out =)

mahmud 16y ago
Email was invented in the early 60s. In 1975, you could move to a technology hub, get an arpanet account, and get a Xerox Alto which had both GUI and networking, an email program, a bitmap editor, games, and ran Smalltalk and Lisp. Inventing the future could be posh, if you're not a Unix weenie ;-)
- mhb 16y ago
  And soon after 1864, you could have been faxing documents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph
- Maro 16y ago
  Yes, but email wasn't universal. Today I can be sitting here in Budapest and do bussiness with people halfway across the globe, all per email. I couldn't do that in 1975. Of course I wouldn't need to. I'd just buy Microsoft stock and live off that in my penthouse suite. Well, that is until Marty McFly shows up... =)
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    And even when it was available, the bandwidth was small enough that you were a little limited in what you could transfer, and how quickly it could get there. I remember circa 1989 when my school (RPI) got onto NYSERNET, at what I believe was a 56kbps link. How much correspondence can be shoved through a pipe that size? Around that same timeframe, outside of academia, us hobbyists that wanted more widespread communication were relying on things like FidoNet[1]. That would package up a BBS's messages and ship them out on a nightly basis -- to a limited number of nodes (I think), so it could take quite a while for messages to propagate to the entire network. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
    - zandorg 16y ago
      Actually, I had email on dialup in 1997, and you could download a modest amount of single user's email, and refresh newsgroups, in about 4 minutes flat.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  A Unix weenie would still have a good time back in 1975. But I have to agree some 70's technology puts to shame lots of stuff we have now. I am only half-joking when I say ST-80 makes Java'2010 look primitive.
gaius 16y ago
The way to do it would be to get a job as a regular employee at somewhere like Microsoft and just wait. Jump ship to Netscape and then Google when the time was right. In terms of tech skills, what would you actually be able to transfer with you? C and FORTRAN probably. Even SQL wasn't big back then.
JoeAltmaier 16y ago
Who would wait? "Say, every thought about arranging code as Objects?"
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

by Maro 16y ago

mahmud 16y ago

Email was invented in the early 60s. In 1975, you could move to a technology hub, get an arpanet account, and get a Xerox Alto which had both GUI and networking, an email program, a bitmap editor, games, and ran Smalltalk and Lisp. Inventing the future could be posh, if you're not a Unix weenie ;-)

mhb 16y ago
And soon after 1864, you could have been faxing documents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph
Maro 16y ago
Yes, but email wasn't universal. Today I can be sitting here in Budapest and do bussiness with people halfway across the globe, all per email. I couldn't do that in 1975. Of course I wouldn't need to. I'd just buy Microsoft stock and live off that in my penthouse suite. Well, that is until Marty McFly shows up... =)
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  And even when it was available, the bandwidth was small enough that you were a little limited in what you could transfer, and how quickly it could get there. I remember circa 1989 when my school (RPI) got onto NYSERNET, at what I believe was a 56kbps link. How much correspondence can be shoved through a pipe that size? Around that same timeframe, outside of academia, us hobbyists that wanted more widespread communication were relying on things like FidoNet[1]. That would package up a BBS's messages and ship them out on a nightly basis -- to a limited number of nodes (I think), so it could take quite a while for messages to propagate to the entire network. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
  - zandorg 16y ago
    Actually, I had email on dialup in 1997, and you could download a modest amount of single user's email, and refresh newsgroups, in about 4 minutes flat.
rbanffy 16y ago
A Unix weenie would still have a good time back in 1975. But I have to agree some 70's technology puts to shame lots of stuff we have now. I am only half-joking when I say ST-80 makes Java'2010 look primitive.

gaius 16y ago

The way to do it would be to get a job as a regular employee at somewhere like Microsoft and just wait. Jump ship to Netscape and then Google when the time was right. In terms of tech skills, what would you actually be able to transfer with you? C and FORTRAN probably. Even SQL wasn't big back then.

JoeAltmaier 16y ago

Who would wait? "Say, every thought about arranging code as Objects?"

deleted 16y ago

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