5 ms·

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, pl

by 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...

by 1053r 16y ago

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...