7 ms·

If you traveled back in time to 1975 equipped with a modern laptop...

56 points by brickmort 12y ago

mixmastamyk 12y ago
Not much, there'd be nothing to connect it to. Hopefully you brought some docs and/or connector cables to keep ya busy. 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.
scottydelta 12y ago
I would carry some of my favorite tv series and watch it there and then kill myself in the absence of internet :P
mariuolo 12y ago
It would be very useful to brute-force cryptographic codes.
- rwmj 12y ago
  I suspect one of the first things that would happen is you would disappear into the NSA/GCHQ/security services of the country you were in (if not disappear entirely). A modern laptop would be enormously valuable in 1975.
- dfox 12y ago
  DES is still well beyond the reach of one guy with a laptop, entire bitcoin network is roughly what you need to bruteforce DES in few minutes.
  - oakwhiz 12y ago
    There exists at least one OpenCL implementation of a DES cracker - a modern laptop GPU could certainly accelerate the process considerably.
    - dfox 12y ago
      Yes, that is why I related required computation power to bitcoin. But still this considerable acceleration does not make it feasible with one laptop or even high-end workstation.
iSnow 12y ago
Let's see - 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.
- oakwhiz 12y ago
  Assuming the laptop contained a GNU/Linux operating system, as well as some way of providing serial ports, you could probably set it up as a multi-user system connected to a bunch of VT50 terminals.
- deleted 12y ago
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- ars 12y ago
  You would attach an acoustic coupler to the mic/headphone jacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler 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.
- deleted 12y ago
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- trentmb 12y ago
  > So, not a very useful thing to have back then 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?
  - yardie 12y ago
    It would still be too modern for 1975. IIRC most winmodems in laptops dropped a bunch of ancient standards. If you can find the spec sheet it will probably show 9600bps as the lowest negotiable rate. In '75, 300bps was probably the max. You'd have better luck using the soundcard than the RJ11 jack.
hyperion2010 12y ago
These questions are always fun, you don't even need to bring the laptop! One of my favourite (and slightly insane) measures of all around knowledge is what you would do if you suddenly found yourself living in the Roman empire circa 200AD (a question largely inspired by the wonderful book: Lest Darkness Fall). In this case what would you do in 1975 using only the knowledge contained in your brain. I'd probably try to jump start work on internet so that networking would be fully integrated from the start and we wouldn't have these stupid browsers.
- ossreality 12y ago
  Huh?
- chad_oliver 12y ago
  Yeah, I love that problem. If you want the maximum effect with the minimum effort, introducing the printing press would be a good move. However, technological change isn't really sufficient -- to do the most good, you'd need to have a strong grasp of economics, politics, medicine, the sciences, and (of course) most fields of technology.
marak830 12y ago
Enjoy 2 years of showing it off, then be really bored while my msft stock builds and im waiting for a replacement haha.
ajuc 12y ago
I would be jailed and executed becaus having no documents, weird speech patterns, and spohisticated technology means I'm American spy. If I landed in nineties instead I would be rich thanks to Apple and Google stocks, and mostly bitcoins.
deleted 12y ago
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lawnchair 12y ago
This reminded me of the book 'Replay' by Ken Grimwood
- MatthewWilkes 12y ago
  Starsea sounded shit.
anabis 12y ago
> Ten deadliest natural disasters since 1900 > 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.
- rdc12 12y ago
  But how would you attempt to lessen the death toll, if you told people you would most likely be ignored or locked up in a loony bin
  - prof_hobart 12y ago
    After correctly predicting the first couple, I'd like to think that people might start listening to you.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- Fuxy 12y ago
  Would you really be willing to risk the continuum by saving them? 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.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  If I learned anything from sci-fi, never mess with time; preventing things like this may have other consequences. What if a child that died in the tsunami was actually the next hitler? What if the population that remained developed a supervirus that kills the entire human race?
valevk 12y ago
Pack a copy of Wikipedia and all major news sites on the harddrive. Also all free papers from academic research and conferences.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  Evopedia will do nicely for that. http://evopedia.info/ http://evopedia.info/
Xophmeister 12y ago
1975 is before my time, but to the best of my knowledge -- backed up with a quick Google -- computers of the time are recognisably similar to computers of today, obviously modulo technological advances. Whereas, if you were to go back a bit further (e.g., pre-silicon, etc.) then people, even experts, would probably find a modern machine somewhat mystical. Anyway, what if we turned things around: What would we think, today, of a computer owned by a time-traveller from 2055? Will there be another "quantum leap" -- possibly quite literally -- like ICs, that will make it an intractable wonder, or will it be basically recognisable?
- scaramanga 12y ago
  Well CPU's will be only a few orders of magnitude faster than they are now. Moore's law is ending. Quantum computers probably won't be any faster. I'd be hoping for interesting software :)
  - restalis 12y ago
    I bet the software will start to resemble an actual engineering, not like our Moore's law era where the hardware capabilities expanded too fast and the software programmers got a lot of rope for too cheap of a price to value it properly! ...and that the number of cores in a processing unit being close to the number of neurons in a brain maybe?
reidrac 12y ago
I though that the whole point of the premise is that with the laptop you have huge computer power that was not available in 1975, but I'm surprised most comments don't find that interesting.
- ghaff 12y ago
  Because it's not really. The laptop would be an immensely powerful computer by the standards of the time, certainly. The Cray-1 came out in 1976 at 80MHz. Not sure how it would compare (doing mathematical calculations) with a modern laptop but I'd guess a few orders of magnitude slower. 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.)
bsaul 12y ago
The problem for me would be that i have absolutely no idea on how one could build that laptop. I wouldn't know how to build a transistor, i have almost 0 knowledge of electronics, people at that time probably knew more than i do. So, except letting them tearing the computer apart to examine it, there's not much i could do. 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.
- jackgolding 12y ago
  I've been thinking about the same thing!
  - dodo53 12y ago
    So has Ryan North @ Dinosaur Comics! http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=TO&Product_Code=QW-CHEATSHEET-PRINT&Category_Code=QW http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=... More readable on boingboing link http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/04/15/time-travel-cheatshe.html http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/04/15/time-travel-cheatsh...
- Fuxy 12y ago
  Don't worry about it most complex circuits these days are in chips so not even electrical engineers know much about how to build one. 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.
  - 12y ago
simgidacav 12y ago
A copy of this thread. 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.
Aardwolf 12y ago
Since it's probably faster than supercomputers of the time: lease its computing power for money
malkia 12y ago
Well I'll show them how it works in the cloud...
aaron695 12y ago
Assuming we are not being silly and 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.
Udo 12y ago
This weekend I game mastered a Cthulhu adventure where the characters are caught up in a plot to bring an entire airplane full of technology back through time to the 40s... :D 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.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > It would probably take drastically longer to offload the files than the expected time-to-failure of the hard drives though, I'm guessing at least one order of magnitude longer, maybe two. 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.
  - Udo 12y ago
    That's true, especially if the operation is not longer confined to myself I expect an impressive amount of jury-rigging could get through the documents pretty quickly. The music stuff would take a bit longer, but it can be done as well. So yeah :)
DanBC 12y ago
I would create short simple demonstrations of all the patentable stuff. I'd apply for as many patents as I could. This would either make Them decide that software patents are not valid; or I'd be granted all the patents and I'd put them in the public domain.
saevarom 12y ago
I hope you would remember to bring your charger
noonespecial 12y ago
The laptop would be irrelevant to a large degree. You'd have seen the future and know whats possible. This would shortcut immense amounts of r&d. Sometimes just knowing that something can be done is the hardest part of figuring out how to do it. Plus you wouldn't accidentally buy a Betamax.
- sanxiyn 12y ago
  Indeed, 1975 means I would be the first person to think of the idea of Polymerase Chain Reaction! That is Nobel Prize stuff, and even if I don't remember the exact details the idea itself would be genius. That's just one thing I thought of. Undoubtedly lots more.
amoss 12y ago
So it is 10 years before GNU and 15 years before Linux... It is also in the era that Microsoft are convincing people that software should have copyright for the first time. 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.
- walterbell 12y ago
  This would require motivated students with access to university computers. Would the universities own code created on their systems? OSS likely wouldn't be permitted for employees of most companies that could afford computers in the late 70s. Also need to find Chuck Peddle and tell him to either avoid Jack Tramiel or not to quit Commodore.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    > 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...
abootstrapper 12y ago
This is easy. Sell the laptop to IBM. Put the money in an interest earning account. Return back to future and enjoy your money and all of the technological advances made by IBM reverse engineering the laptop.
6d0debc071 12y ago
If I travelled back in time with a laptop, loaded with the development environment of my choice, and nothing else besides. 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.
- vidarh 12y ago
  > Well, you could make things quicker but you'd still be limited by the hardware of the time. 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.
code51 12y ago
If you brought back Wikipedia and related research papers about all major technological advances, it'd be so boring for researchers that most of them would probably get depressed and leave their profession. With this depressing state of mind, new research would just slow down instead of speeding up.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Some researchers would be motivated and energized to avoid the Wikipedia-described future. Especially those not in it! Those listed in Wikipedia would get more attention and competition.
zvrba 12y ago
Seek out Bill Gates, show him what he had accomplished and also demonstrate to him all of the security bugs of today and their consequences. On live examples, coded in C++ in the IDE. This to make him consider security from the design stage.
mellisarob 12y ago
what use would it be there without the additional features that assist resulting in mere productivity? it would be waste of resources unless WiFi and other facilities are available back then
- johnsteve 12y ago
  I totally agree with you there.
brokenparser 12y ago
I'd tell them how horrible the "modern" laptop is and how we'd have to turn things around in order to prevent wasting away all that research for decades to come. I'd show them this video: http://vimeo.com/71278954 http://vimeo.com/71278954
junto 12y ago
I'd store all of the stock prices plus lottery and sports results from 1975 onwards on it and encrypt the whole thing. 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.
cocoapriest 12y ago
I would throw away that laptop and instead meet Jobs & Gates and invest into Apple & Microsoft.
declan 12y ago
The original question was: "If you traveled back in time to 1975 equipped with a modern laptop loaded with a development environment of your choice, what's the first thing you'd do?" 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.
csixty4 12y ago
Yeah, I'm probably the wrong person to ask about this. I'd ditch the laptop, buy some cowboy boots and a powder blue leisure suit, then look up Nolan Bushnell's number in the phone book.
mcv 12y ago
I'd keep the laptop secret and buy Apple stock. And write Tetris for the Apple II.

56 points by brickmort 12y ago

Not much, there'd be nothing to connect it to. Hopefully you brought some docs and/or connector cables to keep ya busy. 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.

scottydelta 12y ago

I would carry some of my favorite tv series and watch it there and then kill myself in the absence of internet :P

mariuolo 12y ago

It would be very useful to brute-force cryptographic codes.

rwmj 12y ago
I suspect one of the first things that would happen is you would disappear into the NSA/GCHQ/security services of the country you were in (if not disappear entirely). A modern laptop would be enormously valuable in 1975.
dfox 12y ago
DES is still well beyond the reach of one guy with a laptop, entire bitcoin network is roughly what you need to bruteforce DES in few minutes.
- oakwhiz 12y ago
  There exists at least one OpenCL implementation of a DES cracker - a modern laptop GPU could certainly accelerate the process considerably.
  - dfox 12y ago
    Yes, that is why I related required computation power to bitcoin. But still this considerable acceleration does not make it feasible with one laptop or even high-end workstation.

iSnow 12y ago

Let's see - 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.

oakwhiz 12y ago
Assuming the laptop contained a GNU/Linux operating system, as well as some way of providing serial ports, you could probably set it up as a multi-user system connected to a bunch of VT50 terminals.
deleted 12y ago
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ars 12y ago
You would attach an acoustic coupler to the mic/headphone jacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler 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.
deleted 12y ago
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trentmb 12y ago
> So, not a very useful thing to have back then 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?
- yardie 12y ago
  It would still be too modern for 1975. IIRC most winmodems in laptops dropped a bunch of ancient standards. If you can find the spec sheet it will probably show 9600bps as the lowest negotiable rate. In '75, 300bps was probably the max. You'd have better luck using the soundcard than the RJ11 jack.

hyperion2010 12y ago

These questions are always fun, you don't even need to bring the laptop! One of my favourite (and slightly insane) measures of all around knowledge is what you would do if you suddenly found yourself living in the Roman empire circa 200AD (a question largely inspired by the wonderful book: Lest Darkness Fall). In this case what would you do in 1975 using only the knowledge contained in your brain. I'd probably try to jump start work on internet so that networking would be fully integrated from the start and we wouldn't have these stupid browsers.

ossreality 12y ago
Huh?
chad_oliver 12y ago
Yeah, I love that problem. If you want the maximum effect with the minimum effort, introducing the printing press would be a good move. However, technological change isn't really sufficient -- to do the most good, you'd need to have a strong grasp of economics, politics, medicine, the sciences, and (of course) most fields of technology.

marak830 12y ago

Enjoy 2 years of showing it off, then be really bored while my msft stock builds and im waiting for a replacement haha.

ajuc 12y ago

I would be jailed and executed becaus having no documents, weird speech patterns, and spohisticated technology means I'm American spy. If I landed in nineties instead I would be rich thanks to Apple and Google stocks, and mostly bitcoins.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

lawnchair 12y ago

This reminded me of the book 'Replay' by Ken Grimwood

MatthewWilkes 12y ago
Starsea sounded shit.

anabis 12y ago

> Ten deadliest natural disasters since 1900 > 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.

rdc12 12y ago
But how would you attempt to lessen the death toll, if you told people you would most likely be ignored or locked up in a loony bin
- prof_hobart 12y ago
  After correctly predicting the first couple, I'd like to think that people might start listening to you.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
Fuxy 12y ago
Would you really be willing to risk the continuum by saving them? 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.
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
If I learned anything from sci-fi, never mess with time; preventing things like this may have other consequences. What if a child that died in the tsunami was actually the next hitler? What if the population that remained developed a supervirus that kills the entire human race?

valevk 12y ago

Pack a copy of Wikipedia and all major news sites on the harddrive. Also all free papers from academic research and conferences.

ekianjo 12y ago
Evopedia will do nicely for that. http://evopedia.info/ http://evopedia.info/

Xophmeister 12y ago

1975 is before my time, but to the best of my knowledge -- backed up with a quick Google -- computers of the time are recognisably similar to computers of today, obviously modulo technological advances. Whereas, if you were to go back a bit further (e.g., pre-silicon, etc.) then people, even experts, would probably find a modern machine somewhat mystical. Anyway, what if we turned things around: What would we think, today, of a computer owned by a time-traveller from 2055? Will there be another "quantum leap" -- possibly quite literally -- like ICs, that will make it an intractable wonder, or will it be basically recognisable?

scaramanga 12y ago
Well CPU's will be only a few orders of magnitude faster than they are now. Moore's law is ending. Quantum computers probably won't be any faster. I'd be hoping for interesting software :)
- restalis 12y ago
  I bet the software will start to resemble an actual engineering, not like our Moore's law era where the hardware capabilities expanded too fast and the software programmers got a lot of rope for too cheap of a price to value it properly! ...and that the number of cores in a processing unit being close to the number of neurons in a brain maybe?

reidrac 12y ago

I though that the whole point of the premise is that with the laptop you have huge computer power that was not available in 1975, but I'm surprised most comments don't find that interesting.

ghaff 12y ago
Because it's not really. The laptop would be an immensely powerful computer by the standards of the time, certainly. The Cray-1 came out in 1976 at 80MHz. Not sure how it would compare (doing mathematical calculations) with a modern laptop but I'd guess a few orders of magnitude slower. 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.)

bsaul 12y ago

The problem for me would be that i have absolutely no idea on how one could build that laptop. I wouldn't know how to build a transistor, i have almost 0 knowledge of electronics, people at that time probably knew more than i do. So, except letting them tearing the computer apart to examine it, there's not much i could do. 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.

jackgolding 12y ago
I've been thinking about the same thing!
- dodo53 12y ago
  So has Ryan North @ Dinosaur Comics! http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=TO&Product_Code=QW-CHEATSHEET-PRINT&Category_Code=QW http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=... More readable on boingboing link http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/04/15/time-travel-cheatshe.html http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/04/15/time-travel-cheatsh...
Fuxy 12y ago
Don't worry about it most complex circuits these days are in chips so not even electrical engineers know much about how to build one. 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.
- 12y ago

simgidacav 12y ago

A copy of this thread. 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.

Aardwolf 12y ago

Since it's probably faster than supercomputers of the time: lease its computing power for money

malkia 12y ago

Well I'll show them how it works in the cloud...

aaron695 12y ago

Assuming we are not being silly and 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.

Udo 12y ago

This weekend I game mastered a Cthulhu adventure where the characters are caught up in a plot to bring an entire airplane full of technology back through time to the 40s... :D 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.

DanBC 12y ago
> It would probably take drastically longer to offload the files than the expected time-to-failure of the hard drives though, I'm guessing at least one order of magnitude longer, maybe two. 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.
- Udo 12y ago
  That's true, especially if the operation is not longer confined to myself I expect an impressive amount of jury-rigging could get through the documents pretty quickly. The music stuff would take a bit longer, but it can be done as well. So yeah :)

DanBC 12y ago

I would create short simple demonstrations of all the patentable stuff. I'd apply for as many patents as I could. This would either make Them decide that software patents are not valid; or I'd be granted all the patents and I'd put them in the public domain.

saevarom 12y ago

I hope you would remember to bring your charger

noonespecial 12y ago

The laptop would be irrelevant to a large degree. You'd have seen the future and know whats possible. This would shortcut immense amounts of r&d. Sometimes just knowing that something can be done is the hardest part of figuring out how to do it. Plus you wouldn't accidentally buy a Betamax.

sanxiyn 12y ago
Indeed, 1975 means I would be the first person to think of the idea of Polymerase Chain Reaction! That is Nobel Prize stuff, and even if I don't remember the exact details the idea itself would be genius. That's just one thing I thought of. Undoubtedly lots more.

amoss 12y ago

So it is 10 years before GNU and 15 years before Linux... It is also in the era that Microsoft are convincing people that software should have copyright for the first time. 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.

walterbell 12y ago
This would require motivated students with access to university computers. Would the universities own code created on their systems? OSS likely wouldn't be permitted for employees of most companies that could afford computers in the late 70s. Also need to find Chuck Peddle and tell him to either avoid Jack Tramiel or not to quit Commodore.
- vidarh 12y ago
  > 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...

abootstrapper 12y ago

This is easy. Sell the laptop to IBM. Put the money in an interest earning account. Return back to future and enjoy your money and all of the technological advances made by IBM reverse engineering the laptop.

6d0debc071 12y ago

If I travelled back in time with a laptop, loaded with the development environment of my choice, and nothing else besides. 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.

vidarh 12y ago
> Well, you could make things quicker but you'd still be limited by the hardware of the time. 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.

code51 12y ago

If you brought back Wikipedia and related research papers about all major technological advances, it'd be so boring for researchers that most of them would probably get depressed and leave their profession. With this depressing state of mind, new research would just slow down instead of speeding up.

walterbell 12y ago
Some researchers would be motivated and energized to avoid the Wikipedia-described future. Especially those not in it! Those listed in Wikipedia would get more attention and competition.

zvrba 12y ago

Seek out Bill Gates, show him what he had accomplished and also demonstrate to him all of the security bugs of today and their consequences. On live examples, coded in C++ in the IDE. This to make him consider security from the design stage.

mellisarob 12y ago

what use would it be there without the additional features that assist resulting in mere productivity? it would be waste of resources unless WiFi and other facilities are available back then

johnsteve 12y ago
I totally agree with you there.

brokenparser 12y ago

I'd tell them how horrible the "modern" laptop is and how we'd have to turn things around in order to prevent wasting away all that research for decades to come. I'd show them this video: http://vimeo.com/71278954 http://vimeo.com/71278954

junto 12y ago

I'd store all of the stock prices plus lottery and sports results from 1975 onwards on it and encrypt the whole thing. 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.

cocoapriest 12y ago

I would throw away that laptop and instead meet Jobs & Gates and invest into Apple & Microsoft.

declan 12y ago

The original question was: "If you traveled back in time to 1975 equipped with a modern laptop loaded with a development environment of your choice, what's the first thing you'd do?" 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.

csixty4 12y ago

Yeah, I'm probably the wrong person to ask about this. I'd ditch the laptop, buy some cowboy boots and a powder blue leisure suit, then look up Nolan Bushnell's number in the phone book.

mcv 12y ago

I'd keep the laptop secret and buy Apple stock. And write Tetris for the Apple II.