If anyone remembers the year of that Campbell editorial, within a year or two, I’ll look it up and give the reference. I thought it was in the early '60s, but I don’t have time right now.
I Googled for it, got one link with no date, and a second link to this very thread. :eek:
Returning to the issue of someone in 2030 dropping a CPU or the equivalent into a time vortex and it winding up undamagedin the hands of someone who realized the significance. The average joe on the street would be hard pressed to visually tell that a quad core processor (2006) is any more advanced than a 286 (1982).
But suppose it did wind up in an Intel lab under the prying eyes of a crack team of engineers. Most of what they would discover already exists in theory, we just lack the ability to actually manufacture it. We would avoid some dead end research by determining the materials used. And we would probably be able to discern some of the manufacturing techniques. But we’d still have to build all the equipment to reproduce it.
I can hit the reference stacks at the Merrill Collection on Saturday, if need be. I think I read it reprinted in an anthology put out by Analog in the early eighties, but I may be wrong.
It occurred to me last night that a situation similar to the OP was portrayed in the first of the Back To The Future movies.
In one scene, it was accurately shown that a 1955 camcorder was totally compatible with a 1955 television set (except for the output being black-and-white instead of color). I realize that a big difference between this and the OP was that the OP asked about figuring out the guts of the thing and being able to make more of them, which was certainly not possible. On the other hand, Doc Brown was able to figure out how the controls worked, and that sort of thing. (I do not remember who, in the movie, connected the camcorder to the tv; it was probably Marty, but I’m confident that with a mere 10 seconds or so of explanation about what the device was, Doc could have figured out the rest.)
Any 1955 engineers examining the camcorder would not have been able to figure out the microchips, but seeing the ergonomics and types of controls and other options would certainly have given them a big headstart once the technology caught up.
I clearly recall being a child in the 1960’s, with my still camera and movie camera, wondering when they’d invent a Polaroid movie camera. It would be so cool, I said to myself, to be able to watch a movie immediately after I took it, so that I could reshoot it if desired. But in my mind, there was an insurmountable obstacle: It would only work if the Polaroid process would develop the entire roll of movie film at once. I could not figure out a way to develop the first half of the roll of film, while keeping the second half of the roll unprocessed and available for further filming. Twenty years later, when camcorders came out, I felt like a total idiot for having been stuck on the idea of chemical development of Polaroid film – I was so familiar with audio tape recorders, yet the idea of a video tape recorder, which is immediately reviewable, had never occured to me.
The point of that rant is that even if engineers can’t figure out the technology, seeing the final product can save them years of wandering down useless leads.
They had camcorders in 1955? 
I think you mean 1985. 
Well, that and the fact that the NTSC colour camera was backward-compatible with NTSC monochrome display. If Marty had brought back a point-and-shoot still camera like mine, which happens to record video in better resolution than VHS tape, but stores it as AVIs on an eight-gigabyte flash-memory card, there would be a few issues. So the tech of 1985 was further ahead than that of 1955, but not so much that it was incompatible.
Did you travel back in time to April to answer this post or something?
thanks to everyone who posted…this has been one of the most interesting threads that I’ve read ever online.