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I've often pondered getting stuck back in the 1960s or something with my cell phone, and the astonishing uselessness it would have. It would be feasible at the

by jerf 8y ago

I've often pondered getting stuck back in the 1960s or something with my cell phone, and the astonishing uselessness it would have. It would be feasible at the time to isolate the battery and directly power the rest of the device, but... then what? No internet, no wireless, no mechanism for input or output... it wouldn't be quite useless, but it's not all that useful. Now, send me back with my laptop and it's a completely different story. I've got enough development stuff on that to make serious dough. It would be really weird... probably the fastest communication mechanisms we'd have are using the speaker for modem-based communication, and using the webcam to scan in incoming data somehow, since nothing in that era can even say "hello" to any port I currently have, but we'd be able to get somewhere.

pilsetnieks 8y ago
RS-232 was introduced in 1960, so you're just a USB dongle away from communicating with many devices.
- jerf 8y ago
  In my hypothetical, I was surprised by my sudden time displacement. If I'm prepared, well, like I said, I'd be taking my laptop and conventional computers, not my cell phone per se. Also my cell phone backed up by computers is more useful anyhow. With care and preparation I've got all sorts of options, even going back farther than the 1960s; push comes to shove I can bring solar cells and my own printing press or something, etc.
jolmg 8y ago
> It would be feasible at the time to isolate the battery and directly power the rest of the device Or take a portable solar charger with you. > but... then what? No internet, no wireless, no mechanism for input or output... it wouldn't be quite useless, but it's not all that useful. It can hold a gigantic amount of invaluable information. English Wikipedia as an HTML dump seems to be just 15GB[1]. I think that includes images. All OSM planetary map data seems to be storable in 45GB[2]. If only all knowledge was as accessible. [1] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/static_html_dumps/current/en/ https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/static_html_dumps/current/... [2] https://planet.openstreetmap.org/ https://planet.openstreetmap.org/
- jerf 8y ago
  "It can hold a gigantic amount of invaluable information." Which can only be extracted by somebody hand-copying it down. Possibly we can work up some sort of photograph-based system to just graphically copy it to a book or something, though. Which is also the only hope you have of extracting the map data, too. This is the sort of thing I mean; things you take for granted as being valuable have huge chunks of their value chain hacked away. Audio content would be the easiest to deal with; cell phones would output master-quality recordings of whatever music you may have, because 1960 cables are still bigger than your phone's little jack, but at least they can fabricate a smaller one, electrically compatible with what they already have.

by jerf 8y ago

pilsetnieks 8y ago

RS-232 was introduced in 1960, so you're just a USB dongle away from communicating with many devices.

jerf 8y ago
In my hypothetical, I was surprised by my sudden time displacement. If I'm prepared, well, like I said, I'd be taking my laptop and conventional computers, not my cell phone per se. Also my cell phone backed up by computers is more useful anyhow. With care and preparation I've got all sorts of options, even going back farther than the 1960s; push comes to shove I can bring solar cells and my own printing press or something, etc.

jolmg 8y ago

> It would be feasible at the time to isolate the battery and directly power the rest of the device Or take a portable solar charger with you. > but... then what? No internet, no wireless, no mechanism for input or output... it wouldn't be quite useless, but it's not all that useful. It can hold a gigantic amount of invaluable information. English Wikipedia as an HTML dump seems to be just 15GB[1]. I think that includes images. All OSM planetary map data seems to be storable in 45GB[2]. If only all knowledge was as accessible. [1] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/static_html_dumps/current/en/ https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/static_html_dumps/current/... [2] https://planet.openstreetmap.org/ https://planet.openstreetmap.org/

jerf 8y ago
"It can hold a gigantic amount of invaluable information." Which can only be extracted by somebody hand-copying it down. Possibly we can work up some sort of photograph-based system to just graphically copy it to a book or something, though. Which is also the only hope you have of extracting the map data, too. This is the sort of thing I mean; things you take for granted as being valuable have huge chunks of their value chain hacked away. Audio content would be the easiest to deal with; cell phones would output master-quality recordings of whatever music you may have, because 1960 cables are still bigger than your phone's little jack, but at least they can fabricate a smaller one, electrically compatible with what they already have.