Could the people of 1983 connect to my Macbook Pro?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In this thread, Sampiro raises the intriguing possibility of spending a month in 1983. I mention bring my computer back to 1983, and wonder whether the people then could connect to it. I’d like to expand on that question here.

So… a Macbook Pro. In 1983. Let’s assume that it has the power adaptor and power cord, but no other accessories.

How would people in 1983 be able to connect to it?

It has no RS-232 serial port, no VGA port. There’s a DVI port for an external monitor, but that’s output only, even though I have a DVI-to-SVGA adaptor. I believe the DVI port includes analogue pins for the DVI-to-VGA adaptor.

CDs of any sort weren’t out yet, not to mention DVDs, so there’s be no discs to put in the computer’s optical drive.

The computer has no floppy drive, so floppy disks are out. Even if I had an external floppy drive, it would be 3.5-inch, and I’m not sure whether 3.5-inch floppies were available yet.

Bluetooth or WiFi networking did not exist yet, so there’s nothing to connect wirelessly to the computer.

GSM did not exist yet, so they couldn’t feed something through my cellphone and its Bluetooth link. Actually, I’m not even certain is AMPS analogue cellphones were on the market.

USB and Firewire did not exist yet, so there’s nothing to connect to those ports.

There’s an Ethernet port, but it’s 1000base-T, and uses twisted-pair cabling and an RJ-45 connector. The computer has no problem connecting to a 10base-T Ethernet network, but my cruising around Wikipedia indicates that most Ethernet at the time was 10base-5 (using thick yellow coax) or 10base-2 (using thinner coax cable and BNC connectors). I’m not sure whether 10base-T was out.

The only thing I know is compatible is the power cord.

For reference, I went into the archives and dug out some copies of ETI and Computing Now, two Toronto-based magazines of the time. It seems that, in 1983, the Canada/US home and hobbyist computer world was still very diversified, and the switch from 8-bit machines to 16-bit machines was just beginning. The most popular ‘clone’ board for the hobbyist seems to be the ‘6502 board’ which was Apple-II-compatible; the ‘8088’ boards that were IBM-compatible were just appearing. CP/M was still strong as an operating system. MS-DOS/PC-DOS was new along with the IBM PCs it ran on. There were Apples and SuperPETs and Atari 800s and Acorns and ZX81s and TRS-80s and many, many others.

But that’s the home market. What of the universities? They certainly have access to Unix and greater design skill and resources.

Would it be possible for a university research team in 1983 to reverse-engineer, say, a USB port? Firewire? What about the CD or DVD drive?

2

Your best (perhaps only, that I can think of) is getting a USB to COM port cable.

Outside of that you’re limited to the eyes n’ fingers 2-way port.

3

Yes, they were:

4

I have no idea when 10Base-T was released, but assuming it was totally unavailable in 1983 I’m extremely confident one of the major hardware companies of the day could develop a working adapter within a few weeks. You can find adapters designed to allow you to connect to a 10Base-5 network using a 10Base-T transceiver.

The technology different between the various types of cabling being discussed aren’t nearly so significant that people in 1983 would have trouble adapting something quite quickly. CDs were already in production in 1983, CD-ROM was released to the public in 1985 so ostensibly it was in development several years before that.

While we couldn’t release CD-ROM to the consumer market prior to 1985, I imagine the engineers and researchers who were working on CD-ROM could put together a working disk for limited “emergency use” in 1983.

Think about video game console development–typically the company has working prototypes long before the console is finally released. These earlier models won’t work as well as the release version but they still “function.” So I don’t think it’d be that hard to quickly find a way to communicate with your MacBook.

5

“CD-ROM” came out in 1985, CDs in 1982. If you take the MacBook Pro to Sony or Philips I imagine they’d be able to load data onto it using a CD (the physical technology is obviously identical, but without proper formatting you can’t transfer data), but you couldn’t go into a store and buy a CD-ROM in 1983. You also would have a hard time finding a way to actually burn stuff onto the disc without going to a Sony or a Philips, not many people had that type of equipment back then.

6

There were primitive CD storage devices in use by 1985 that I used, and I think 1983 they had just been introduced shortly before. Reverse engineering the CD format might be tough.

The Mac book would blow peoples mind, it would be extremely valuable to any computer hardware company. I suspect IBM or Intel would have done anything for it and the Russians and the CIA would have killed to acquire it if needed.

As to connections, the Ethernet port would have been the ticket. It would not be too hard to make the handshake to your far faster machine. I suspect that any good computer hardware company would have figured it out quickly.

BTW: Any Parallel ports on the a Macbook?

Jim

7

I don’t know about your Macbook, but a lot of modern laptops still have regular phone jacks- you may have a modem onboard, and so you’d be fine.

8

:: ponders ::

What if I just show up on Apple’s front door?

Parallel port? What is this ‘parallel port’? :slight_smile:

Nope. I’d have to get a USB-to-parallel adaptor.

I do have a USB-to-serial adaptor. And to plug into it, a serial-to-HP48 adaptor so that I can talk to my HP48 calculator. But I haven’t got that working under OS X because it requires that I know may way around the Unix file system and compile the ckermit communications program.

If I was writing this into a book, I think I’d make it easier on everyone by including a well-stocked computer bag around the MacBook Pro that would have blank CDs and DVDs, serial and SVGA adaptors, an external floppy drive, cables, manuals, etc, etc. I’m sure that having samples of the recordable discs would make things a lot easier.

But how possible is it to completely reverse-engineer a digital communications protocol if you only have the hardware for one end? Is it possible to somehow deconstruct the hardware, figure out the voltages and timings for connection, find the programs inside, deduce what they do, etc, etc, and then build compatible equipment?

I suspect that having both ends of the link (two USB devices and a cable, for example) would make the task a lot easier, because then you could observe the thing in action.

9

Nope. No onboard modem; it’s a $60 accessory that connects to a USB port.

10

I used to run a Radio Shack in the early to mid-80’s and one of the stores was in Gaithersburg MD near to the National Bureau Of Standards complex, and we always had the NBS guys, and various beltway bandit techies wandering through for this or that. As a time reference the TRS-80 Model 100 had just come out right at that time and was the cutting edge of portability. It was probably the first true “notebook” form factor computer.

Just as a notion I always thought it would be interesting if I could go back in time and put some some sweet, modern 17 inch high end notebook open and running some fancy high detail FPS behind the counter. When someone asked what it was I would “Tsk-Tsk” and just tell him it belonged to a part timer, and that he should not have left it out, close it and put it away under the counter.

The amusing conceit is that they would be more than tech savvy enough to know that nothing like that existed on the planet. But what could they do if I wouldn’t let them inspect it?

11

Call Homeland Security? Oh, wait…

Okay, the CIA.

12

When I first watched the movie The Last Starfighter in 1984, they showed the video game that Alex Rogan plays as having a 3D, sort of OpenGL, type of graphics. It was so advanced at that time that i thought for sure that Alex ought to recognise it wasn’t like a regular video game. This was at a time when the most cutting edge graphics were like those seen in the original Pole Position.

I couldn’t imagine what games would be like when they got to be as cool as Starfighter. Now, of course, it looks sad and primitive, which is a shame. I think, though, that games like Wing Commander were probably influenced by it.

13

3D was already being done in computer games by 1980. Though admittedly the graphics aren’t amazing even by 1984:

14

I have to point out that state of the art for supercomputers in 1983 was the Cray X-MP which was capable of 200-400 MFlops. According to this forum, in July 2007 the MacBook Pro reached between 72,803 and 97,623 MFlops using a real application (Photoshop).

A single MacBook Pro probably has more raw processing power than the total of all existing computers in 1983. Also, in 1983 a megabyte of RAM was ungodly expensive, huge, and consumed who knows how much power. I can imagine what people would think of carrying 2 GB in your hands powered by a small battery.

Even if you could connect to the MacBook, it would output data so fast nothing in existence could keep up with it and there would not be enough memory to store it.

15

Interesting concept, but there would be plenty of storage, it would just take the big old fashions full reel tapes to do so. My first computer job in 1993, I had to transfer data from a Tandem to AS400 by tape. The AS400 was vastly faster and quicker and smaller than the Tandem, but tape handled the job.

16

I think one benefit of taking a Mac would be the Unix-based operating system. (The latest OS, Leopard actually is Unix from what I recall.) They would be able to use it, and program it if it comes with a compiler which I think it does.

I’d bet you could kludge together some sort of communication protocol, if the laptop comes with documentation on how control the computer’s systems. For instance, perhaps you could simply toggle the Bluetooth or Wi-fi signal on and off. (Maybe with an Apple script?) Or, maybe set up an array of light sensors in front of the laptop screen and then have a bunch of square sectors of the screen that change colors or just pulse black and white to transmit data.

It comes with a built-in microphone, right? Then you’ve got a modem with the headphone jack as output and the microphone or microphone-jack as input. They could come up with something, the question is how easily and how much data you’d be able to transmit.

17

Heh. A link in that MacForum thread led me to a little program called PowerFractal, which I downloaded and ran. It put a pretty picture on my screen and said that it achieved 12687.2 megaFLOPS. Given that I have all kinds of other stuff up and running, including Windows (which I’d minimised and forgotten about), that’s not bad. :slight_smile:

18

Actually, I think that was a Mac Pro, their top-of-the-line desktop machine, not a Macbook Pro.

19

Yes. OS X 10.5 is certified as Unix 03 compliant on Intel machines. Open a terminal window, you have gcc and all the utilities and man pages, and can run the tutorials right out of the K&R C book. The folks at Berkeley would feel right at home.

Oh! I never thought of that! The audio jacks. Line in and line out.

I’m certain that after a bit of fiddling, someone could create a program what would take arbitrary text and create a soundfile in Audacity which, when played back by the MacBook Pro’s sound hardware, would yield FSK audio tones that could be demodulated by a modem and converted to data to yield the text. And, likewise for the other direction: a program to sample and software-demodulate incoming FSK audio.

In other words, it would simulate a cassette port on a MacBook Pro.

20

Yeah, but it was achingly slow, and it wasn’t used in arcade games, as far as I know. I’m not sure if Pole Position even used 3D to generate its track, or if it was faked.