I was wondering what scientists and engineers in 1960 would make of my cell phone if I traveled back in time with it.
Would they be able to make head or tails of it? Would they be able to learn anything from it that would catapult the technology of the day?
Or, would they be completely befuddled by a modern cell phone? Certainly they know it is tech and not magic but, beyond that, could they get much from examining it? (maybe battery tech)
I picked 1960s because it is within many of our lifetimes (certainly mine) but don’t get too hung up on that. I am curious how far back we could go before tech becomes impossible for the locals to decipher.
In 1960 IBM asked for applications of a super computer that would fit in a coffee cup. Nobody suggested a telephone. Had a cell phone appeared, we would have figured out the phone use. However lacking a cell tower and digital network it would not have worked very well.
ETA: At the time I was working on a portable management terminal. The cell phone would have solved the problem. Thus distracted I might have missed the phone part.
There is nothing in the cell phone that we could not have understood. The computer and it’s peripherals were known quantities. The amazing thing is the miniaturization. The LCD screen was novel, but we had Marcel Vogel in our lab. He’s the Phd who was working with elastomeric crystals.
The cell concept was unknown and required a part of the spectrum that is way above anything we used.
I don’t believe we would have had a problem with concepts. Converting the world to digital was our business. We did not have access to components that would make it practical.
If someone just handed over a powered-off smartphone to someone in the 1960s, it would also be interesting to see how long they even figured out what it was.
Electron microscopes have been around for nearly a century, so I think probably yes. The problem is that the interesting parts of an IC are typically embedded deep inside a protective block of plastic, so you have to destroy it in order to be able to see what’s in there.
The rest of the features on your phone likely beat any 1960 calculating device, even without any network connectivity. Handheld full-color HD video and audio recording and playback, storage for hours of video and thousands of photos, sophisticated gameplay (racing/flight simulators, etc.), a touchscreen that understands gestures,
If the phone goes back to 1960 with an end user who doesn’t have intimate knowledge of the engineering inside a smartphone, my guess is that the 1960s engineers won’t be able to get much out of it directly. I think maybe the biggest thing would be the inspiration of knowing that such a thing is definitely possible, which might incentivize accelerated investment. Imagine if you could take a 747 and an F/A-18 back to 1850 for some demo flights, a few decades before the first instances of powered flight. They wouldn’t have the metallurgy or manufacturing capabilities to make those kinds of planes, but having been convinced that such incredible machines are definitely possible, skeptics would all be told to fuck right off and there would be far greater enthusiasm, effort, and wealth put into advancing the state of the art.
Everybody knows that microchip technology was reverse-engineered from alien tech recovered at the Roswell crash in 1947, so by 1960 scientists were well on the way to making heads or tails of it.
More seriously, I think 1960 scientists would have been able to figure out and understand how the OP’s cellphone worked, but microchips would have required not-yet existing tech to be able to reproduce. So they probably would have understood the principles, but not been able to reproduce it. But it would have definitely pointed them in the right direction.
The screen would probably be very useful. Passing bits of current through it would give good feedback, and the phenomenon behind LCDs had been discovered in the 60s. So it would be a massive boost for display and touch technologies.
Other things are less clear cut. I feel that they might try to push too much current through the processor in the first instance and fry it immediately.
“The CPU from the first Terminator. They told us not to ask where they got it. It’s scary stuff, radically advanced. I mean it was smashed, it didn’t work, but it gave us ideas, took us in new directions, things we would have never thought…”
Concept wasn’t the problem. In 1960 I was designing touch control panels using 3 element neon lamps. That was difficult. Today you just buy the stuff from a distributor.
It is interesting to consider whether we could have reverse engineered the LCD display. That might have been possible and it would have been very revealing. The computer was commonplace. It was just amazingly small. The flat plate color display would have been new and of great interest. It is the kind of system we were working on at the time. I believe our team could have discerned it’s operation, but the materials and machines did not exist to reproduce it.
The Chinese are the experts at this. Dissolving plastic casings is nothing, they’ll open that chip up and take pictures as they remove microscopic layer after layer. They’re after the data, they may have an integrated database of technology designs available no where else. And they are far past the simply copying phase, they are developing their own style of technology.
Not the deep layers, but digital systems are orderly. The peripheral components are fairly easy to identify: microphone, speaker, RF transmitter/receiver, touch input, LCD output. It would not take long to come up with a black box diagram. Most of it would have been familiar.
And don’t forget that part of the amazing tech of a cell phone is the miniaturization itself. IOW, putting the device itself aside for a moment, a lot could be learned by reverse engineering the miniaturization techniques.
Not only would the phone accelerate research into such a device, but also the manner of producing it.
