You’re the President of the US, it’s 1965. A mysterious Englishman comes into your office.
“Hi, don’t be alarmed but I’m from the future. You can call me Fiendish Astronaut. I’ve bought you this computer from 2013, it’s called a MacBook Air. As you can see it’s very light. Let me show you how it works. See this is the on button here. That light on the back is just the manufacturer’s logo. This is how the trackpad works. I’ve loaded some software on here already, nothing too powerful but some basic stuff. It’s a gift for you. Do what you want with it. Thanks. Bye!”
I stop you immediately and wonder how the heck you got by the Secret Service.
Then I call in my science advisor about the device and you.
You end of being used as a subject in a series of unpleasant tests.
We had plenty of knowledge of semiconductors, transistors, and integrated circuits in 1965, so surely our nation’s brightest could disassemble the MacBook and at least identify how it works at a high level. Some fancy microscopy would reveal that the parts are just incredibly, unimaginably tiny versions of components that we were already familiar with.
The OS would be pretty interesting, seeing as AT&T was busy inventing Unix at exactly that time, and MacBooks run on a variant of BSD.
It would be far more mindblowing if you gave one to Truman instead of Johnson. Unless it was Andrew Johnson.
Other than the fact that it can be done and possibly pointing the way to technologies you should invest in the finished product will be a (IMO) fairly limited use to the US or the world. The finished product sits at the tip top of a mountain of underlying manufacturing, interlocking technologies and predicate science that is not going to be able to be extracted from the finished machine. We’ll be able to get some clues out of it in 1963 but not as many as you might think. As friedo pointed out it’s mostly fabrication and materials advances, there’s relatively little true paradigm changing science in the completed product.
I actually think the LCD screen would be the hardest thing for them to wrap their heads around.
See the link; that’s what I thought about a modern desktop; something like a MacBook would blow their minds. Consensus was that the electron microscopes of the time wouldn’t be to even pick up 45/32 nanometer technology. They’d probably end up unwittingly destroying it (especially the HDD) in the process of dissecting it.
Actually, Apple products are generally marked “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China”, which, if you’re paying attention in 1963, tells you something interesting and not particularly disturbing about the economic state of the world in 2013.
I think they’d start exploring the state of the software before doing anything else. If you bring up a Terminal and type “help”, that gives you the help text for GNU bash, which mentions the man command. They could learn a lot about *nix from that. Probably enough to start using the Mac for general computation in a major way.
If this is 1965, I must be LBJ. I have my heart attack early. Hubert Humphrey becomes President. In the excitement nobody notices an oddly dressed man sneak out of a blue British police booth, snag the device, and walk back to the booth, phoning his granddaughter…
What programs are loaded onto it? I would think word processing, spreadsheets, etc would be very interesting and probably useful but I can’t see anything earth-shaking coming out the programs. I wouldn’t be able to connect to the internet, obviously, so that aspect of it (browser programs and such) would be really confusing and I wouldn’t be able to figure out what they were supposed to do. If you had some games on it, the graphics would knock my socks off.
As others have pointed out, I’d recognize it as something revolutionary and way more advanced than current technology and try to reverse engineer it. It’s likely they’d break it in the process but they could still examine the circuits and suchwith microscopes and try to figure it out. I don’t know how much it would advance computing technology but I’m sure we’d get at least some advancements.
So, by 2013 we will be more advanced then we were when you originally went back in time. A paradox would be created, the universe would collapse, and everything would cease to exist.
Except, of course, for Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which is protected by a time bubble. People would watch everything go “foom” to the linguistic stylings of our host, Max Quadropleen (sp?) and cheer while a cow nipped off and shot itself (don’t worry, it will be very humane) to make steaks for dinner.
The president wouldn’t be able to do a darn thing with it, but the right computer scientists could probably learn a lot from it, until it broke. Then it would be good for ideas but they wouldn’t be able to understand or duplicate much of it.
I think the main problem is, did we have the technology to make any of the major parts (the CPU, the hard drive, the graphics processor) back in 1965? (When I say “make a CPU”, I mean “make a CPU with the transistor density of what’s in a MacBook Air”.)
I think the part of the computer that would have given us the most knowledge that could be exploited at the time would be the flat screen.
If we could reproduce the processing technology, even for just a few units, the most likely place for them would be NASA.
Since this is obviously a time traveler, can it be the Doctor? If so, it would be even cooler if he could do that thing he does with cell phones to it so the Wi-Fi was able to access the modern-day internet.
Without the internet, an Air would be an amazing and wonderful oddity, but not too much else. Maybe if the software included some sort of compiler that would allow me to put the science wizzes on to writing code for it, in which case it could probably run Mission Control all by itself when it came time for the moon launch…