8 ms·

We Are Not Time Travelers

137 points by rgrieselhuber 16y ago

sambeau 16y ago
Panic did something similar last December: http://www.panic.com/blog/2009/12/panic-retro-art/ http://www.panic.com/blog/2009/12/panic-retro-art/
1053r 16y ago
Wow. Someone besides me has fantasized about bringing modern tech to the past. Has anyone else thought what, say a nexus one (with my handy hp-48 emulator, plus shell scripting) would do to say, ww2? I'm pretty sure whichever side got their hands on it would just win. Instant artillery calculations, speeding up the nuclear program by about a factor of 1000, and some serious encryption capabilities. All in the palm of my hand. I'm not even talking about bringing the cell phone network or the internet with me. Just perhaps a few cached wikipedia articles.
- grandalf 16y ago
  I think you'd need two to have an impact in ww2 for crypto purposes..
  - petewarden 16y ago
    Wouldn't even just one be insanely useful for decryption? I've been lost by pretty much every description of what they actually did at Bletchley Park (anyone have recommended links?) but it seems like they could do a lot with some decent computing power.
    - jerf 16y ago
      Poking through Wikipedia's entry on Colossus led me to http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/news/docview.rhtm/487682 http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/news/docview.rhtm/487682 , which has this quote: "My laptop digested ciphertext at a speed of 1.2 million characters per second – 240 times faster than Colossus. If you scale the CPU frequency by that factor, you get an equivalent clock of 5.8 MHz for Colossus. That is a remarkable speed for a computer built in 1944." It should be pointed out that a linear scaling is inappropriate, though, because Colossus was not Turing complete, which makes direct comparisons very tricky. The very oldest things we today call "computers" tended to do a lot of stuff in very, very specialized hardware, and converting that into a modern-day, very general-purpose "clock cycle" is not trivial. It might be better to understand this as a glorified GPU-like processor. Only even less powerful, as it was even more special-purpose than a modern GPU. (Or at least it will be better, if you understand the intrinsic limitations of GPU-like processing. If you're a Cell fanboy who bought the Sony's PS3 gibberish about performance hook line and sinker and still haven't worked out why Cell-based computers haven't destroyed Intel without invoking some sort of paranoid theory, that might not be as helpful a way of understanding things as I'd like.)
    - mbrubeck 16y ago
      Yes, especially if you had Mike Koss's Enigma simulator: http://startpad.org/blog/diving-android-development-the-pocket-enigma-machine http://startpad.org/blog/diving-android-development-the-pock...
- billswift 16y ago
  >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.
- Niten 16y ago
  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.
  - unwind 16y ago
    +1. There's nothing like running an emulation of a 2 MHz 64/20-bit CPU (with a 4-bit programming model) implemented in a language that compiles to a virtual machine, running on a 1 GHz processor in your pocket. It's just awesome.
- chipsy 16y ago
  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.
- bad_user 16y ago
  What would you do with a Nexus One, without a GSM network or without the Internet? By itself it's pretty useless.
  - stralep 16y ago
    And more powerful computer than anything they have ever seen...
JunkDNA 16y ago
This is entertaining. I have never been able to figure out why there was so much faux wood on seemingly everything made in the '70's. Why did everyone feel compelled to use it?
- petercooper 16y ago
  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!)
  - ugh 16y ago
    I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Some products will look out of date. Some won’t. Here is a record player from 1956: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickwade/4130988683/in/pool-464886@N22 http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickwade/4130988683/in/pool-464... And a tape deck from 1975: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8944091@N08/2068062385/in/pool-464886@N22 http://www.flickr.com/photos/8944091@N08/2068062385/in/pool-... The technology is obsolete but I don’t think the design is.
- Hoff 16y ago
  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/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/jef/422559909/
- DannoHung 16y ago
  Because Faux-wood panelling is awesome. I've got a faux wood faceplate for my XBox that is love.
tripngroove 16y ago
This guy has done an admirable job of appropriating the visual style of Scott Hansen, of iso50.net / Tycho, who has been making design in a similar vein for many years. Here are two designs I was immediately reminded of; both because of the style and, for these two in particular, the subject matter. http://www.merchline.com/iso50/productdisplay.3969.p.htm http://www.merchline.com/iso50/productdisplay.3969.p.htm / http://www.merchline.com/iso50/categorydisplay.2586.c.htm http://www.merchline.com/iso50/categorydisplay.2586.c.htm I enjoy Scott's work and have purchased a few of his posters. This one is my favorites: http://blog.iso50.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/iso50-northern-lights.jpg http://blog.iso50.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/iso50-north... Even further back in the aesthetic pedigree of this work you'll note similarities to the work of Shepard Fairey, who created the OBEY giant phenomenon and, more recently, the iconic, 3-color HOPE poster for Obama's presidential campaign. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey
- jerf 16y ago
  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.)
- barrkel 16y ago
  I remember real ads in similar style (for a Commodore machine!) from the mid 80s, much less the 70s.
karzeem 16y ago
If you couldn't take present-day gadgets back with you, there's a good chance that you wouldn't get much payoff from your knowledge of the future. Say you're in 1975 and know exactly how to build an iPhone. It simply wouldn't be possible to do. Technology tends to come into existence pretty soon after it becomes possible for it to exist. Right after an achievement becomes possible, there is a window (say, 2-3 years) where people compete to create the definitive implementation. But it's not certain that knowledge from the future would help you beat the others. It would probably help, but that advantage could easily be wiped out by the same things that wipe out any other technology project (bad hacking, bad management, etc.)
- sambeau 16y ago
  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
  - tome 16y ago
    Men and women have different cars? Where is this? The US?
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      I see this in a small sector of the rich middle classes here in the UK - a rich wife, often a mother, has a huge SUV for the school run whilst the husband has a town car for parking at the railway station or has a sales rep standard issue.
  - nooneelse 16y ago
    Bradbury predicted much bigger TV's in the 1950's.
- armandososa 16y ago
thefool 16y ago
Were these "hand" illustrated? Or is there some easier way to make graphics look this awesome?
- stan_rogers 16y ago
  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.
  - thefool 16y ago
    So like the cassettes are just like 3D models of boxes with a skin applied? And the phone and laptop are also rendered in 3D, and then rotated and skinned? It seems like it would be quite a bit of work to make that cell phone in 3D max (mostly the keys would be annoying to produce). There isn't any clever way of doing the background though right?
bshock 16y ago
These are considerably more fun than the usual ideas, such as taking back future knowledge of the stock market, real estate trends, sporting events, or lottery numbers.
Groxx 16y ago
Anywhere I can buy that Pocket Hi-Fi? Honestly, if it pumped out epic audio quality, I'd be more than happy with that interface (with more pixels in the text fields, I've got some other-language-named songs). iPods have been noticeably insufficient for my Grados, and that'd be a perfect complementary style.
- stan_rogers 16y ago
  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/ 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.
simonsquiff 16y ago
Great idea brilliantly executed. Not only is this guy a fantastic designer he's also a very strong copy writer. The advert headline and copy is really nicely crafted. I think a company copy style where they constantly profess things like "our company definitely was started by time travellers 33 years in the future" is a wonderful idea to actually use in real life for some high tech firm. Cheeky and playful it would get a lot of attention.
- simonsquiff 16y ago
  Oops that was meant to be 'definately wasn't started by time travellers' obviously!
mhd 16y ago
Ah, the '70s, the age of orange. (Although complaining about that on HN seems a bit ironic) And if someone makes a window manager theme for the laptop interface, tell me. Meanwhile, I'm hunting for some basic interpreters...
pablasso 16y ago
It could help if you take an sports almanac and become rich gambling (BTTF!). You know, to be able to fund those projects, or you're gonna sound like crazy to potential investors.

137 points by rgrieselhuber 16y ago

Panic did something similar last December: http://www.panic.com/blog/2009/12/panic-retro-art/ http://www.panic.com/blog/2009/12/panic-retro-art/

1053r 16y ago

Wow. Someone besides me has fantasized about bringing modern tech to the past. Has anyone else thought what, say a nexus one (with my handy hp-48 emulator, plus shell scripting) would do to say, ww2? I'm pretty sure whichever side got their hands on it would just win. Instant artillery calculations, speeding up the nuclear program by about a factor of 1000, and some serious encryption capabilities. All in the palm of my hand. I'm not even talking about bringing the cell phone network or the internet with me. Just perhaps a few cached wikipedia articles.

grandalf 16y ago
I think you'd need two to have an impact in ww2 for crypto purposes..
- petewarden 16y ago
  Wouldn't even just one be insanely useful for decryption? I've been lost by pretty much every description of what they actually did at Bletchley Park (anyone have recommended links?) but it seems like they could do a lot with some decent computing power.
  - jerf 16y ago
    Poking through Wikipedia's entry on Colossus led me to http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/news/docview.rhtm/487682 http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/news/docview.rhtm/487682 , which has this quote: "My laptop digested ciphertext at a speed of 1.2 million characters per second – 240 times faster than Colossus. If you scale the CPU frequency by that factor, you get an equivalent clock of 5.8 MHz for Colossus. That is a remarkable speed for a computer built in 1944." It should be pointed out that a linear scaling is inappropriate, though, because Colossus was not Turing complete, which makes direct comparisons very tricky. The very oldest things we today call "computers" tended to do a lot of stuff in very, very specialized hardware, and converting that into a modern-day, very general-purpose "clock cycle" is not trivial. It might be better to understand this as a glorified GPU-like processor. Only even less powerful, as it was even more special-purpose than a modern GPU. (Or at least it will be better, if you understand the intrinsic limitations of GPU-like processing. If you're a Cell fanboy who bought the Sony's PS3 gibberish about performance hook line and sinker and still haven't worked out why Cell-based computers haven't destroyed Intel without invoking some sort of paranoid theory, that might not be as helpful a way of understanding things as I'd like.)
  - mbrubeck 16y ago
    Yes, especially if you had Mike Koss's Enigma simulator: http://startpad.org/blog/diving-android-development-the-pocket-enigma-machine http://startpad.org/blog/diving-android-development-the-pock...
billswift 16y ago
>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.
Niten 16y ago
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.
- unwind 16y ago
  +1. There's nothing like running an emulation of a 2 MHz 64/20-bit CPU (with a 4-bit programming model) implemented in a language that compiles to a virtual machine, running on a 1 GHz processor in your pocket. It's just awesome.
chipsy 16y ago
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.
bad_user 16y ago
What would you do with a Nexus One, without a GSM network or without the Internet? By itself it's pretty useless.
- stralep 16y ago
  And more powerful computer than anything they have ever seen...

JunkDNA 16y ago

This is entertaining. I have never been able to figure out why there was so much faux wood on seemingly everything made in the '70's. Why did everyone feel compelled to use it?

petercooper 16y ago
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!)
- ugh 16y ago
  I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Some products will look out of date. Some won’t. Here is a record player from 1956: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickwade/4130988683/in/pool-464886@N22 http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickwade/4130988683/in/pool-464... And a tape deck from 1975: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8944091@N08/2068062385/in/pool-464886@N22 http://www.flickr.com/photos/8944091@N08/2068062385/in/pool-... The technology is obsolete but I don’t think the design is.
Hoff 16y ago
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/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/jef/422559909/
DannoHung 16y ago
Because Faux-wood panelling is awesome. I've got a faux wood faceplate for my XBox that is love.

tripngroove 16y ago

This guy has done an admirable job of appropriating the visual style of Scott Hansen, of iso50.net / Tycho, who has been making design in a similar vein for many years. Here are two designs I was immediately reminded of; both because of the style and, for these two in particular, the subject matter. http://www.merchline.com/iso50/productdisplay.3969.p.htm http://www.merchline.com/iso50/productdisplay.3969.p.htm / http://www.merchline.com/iso50/categorydisplay.2586.c.htm http://www.merchline.com/iso50/categorydisplay.2586.c.htm I enjoy Scott's work and have purchased a few of his posters. This one is my favorites: http://blog.iso50.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/iso50-northern-lights.jpg http://blog.iso50.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/iso50-north... Even further back in the aesthetic pedigree of this work you'll note similarities to the work of Shepard Fairey, who created the OBEY giant phenomenon and, more recently, the iconic, 3-color HOPE poster for Obama's presidential campaign. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey

jerf 16y ago
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.)
barrkel 16y ago
I remember real ads in similar style (for a Commodore machine!) from the mid 80s, much less the 70s.

karzeem 16y ago

If you couldn't take present-day gadgets back with you, there's a good chance that you wouldn't get much payoff from your knowledge of the future. Say you're in 1975 and know exactly how to build an iPhone. It simply wouldn't be possible to do. Technology tends to come into existence pretty soon after it becomes possible for it to exist. Right after an achievement becomes possible, there is a window (say, 2-3 years) where people compete to create the definitive implementation. But it's not certain that knowledge from the future would help you beat the others. It would probably help, but that advantage could easily be wiped out by the same things that wipe out any other technology project (bad hacking, bad management, etc.)

sambeau 16y ago
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
- tome 16y ago
  Men and women have different cars? Where is this? The US?
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    I see this in a small sector of the rich middle classes here in the UK - a rich wife, often a mother, has a huge SUV for the school run whilst the husband has a town car for parking at the railway station or has a sales rep standard issue.
- nooneelse 16y ago
  Bradbury predicted much bigger TV's in the 1950's.
armandososa 16y ago

thefool 16y ago

Were these "hand" illustrated? Or is there some easier way to make graphics look this awesome?

stan_rogers 16y ago
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.
- thefool 16y ago
  So like the cassettes are just like 3D models of boxes with a skin applied? And the phone and laptop are also rendered in 3D, and then rotated and skinned? It seems like it would be quite a bit of work to make that cell phone in 3D max (mostly the keys would be annoying to produce). There isn't any clever way of doing the background though right?

bshock 16y ago

These are considerably more fun than the usual ideas, such as taking back future knowledge of the stock market, real estate trends, sporting events, or lottery numbers.

Groxx 16y ago

Anywhere I can buy that Pocket Hi-Fi? Honestly, if it pumped out epic audio quality, I'd be more than happy with that interface (with more pixels in the text fields, I've got some other-language-named songs). iPods have been noticeably insufficient for my Grados, and that'd be a perfect complementary style.

stan_rogers 16y ago
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/ 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.

simonsquiff 16y ago

Great idea brilliantly executed. Not only is this guy a fantastic designer he's also a very strong copy writer. The advert headline and copy is really nicely crafted. I think a company copy style where they constantly profess things like "our company definitely was started by time travellers 33 years in the future" is a wonderful idea to actually use in real life for some high tech firm. Cheeky and playful it would get a lot of attention.

simonsquiff 16y ago
Oops that was meant to be 'definately wasn't started by time travellers' obviously!

mhd 16y ago

Ah, the '70s, the age of orange. (Although complaining about that on HN seems a bit ironic) And if someone makes a window manager theme for the laptop interface, tell me. Meanwhile, I'm hunting for some basic interpreters...

pablasso 16y ago

It could help if you take an sports almanac and become rich gambling (BTTF!). You know, to be able to fund those projects, or you're gonna sound like crazy to potential investors.