If I took my PC back to 1960, I’d not do so before having a heavy varnished wooden case with brass knobs made for it. Maybe with a tiny steam engine and generator as well. I’d also wear Edwardian clothes. Just to mess with their minds.
If you had Excel or Lotus 123 and some good documentation (for dummies?, nah good documentation you could sell you 'puter to some large corp. for some serious bucks.
That depends on how much detail you want in your sims. Remember, the first atomic bombs were designed using state-of-the-art adding machines staffed by roomfulls of operators, and your PC can certainly do everything those adding machines could. Provided it came with a compiler or interpreter for a language you could teach them (or with very good documentation), a modern computer could be an incredibly useful research tool. And even if you couldn’t get any peripheals to work with it, it’d still be huge cost-savings if you just paid some human to transcribe information off of the screen.
You know, I just had a thought. It’s possible that doing this would have a stultifying effect on computer advancement. You show up in 1960, during the Cold War, and explain that everyone has one of these things, the paranoid national security types, probably aren’t going to buy that. I mean, you’ve got a box that’s more powerful than anything everyone’s ever seen, made in a way that no one can do, chocked full of little labels that say “Made in China” and given that Moore’s law hasn’t even been coined yet, muchless made it’s way into the popular culture, so they’re probably going to think that you’re traveling from 100 or more years in the future and not a mere 40. They’re first instinct is naturally going to be to clamp down on hard on any computer research, and while the military folks might get the technological advancement, the rest of us are probably going to have to make do with Commodore 64s in the 21st Century. :eek:
Anything you do will change the future in some way or another. Making $100 K in each of a few dozen stocks would seem to change it a lot less than pointing people to oil fields ahead of time. Not to mention the impact on the computer field.
But Tuckerfan has a good point. One look at Made in China stickers, and they’ll lock you up where the sun don’t shine - you’d probably get out about 2004 
I really, really disagree here. You could change the market capitalization of whole industries by producing early optimism for companies you know are going in the right direction. Giving Apple a couple hundred thousand when it’s still selling computer kits would do more than line Jobs’ and Wozniak’s pocketbooks: It would create a heightened interest in their company, and that would have a knock-on effect throughout the nascent microcomputer industry. Apple could easily become more potent than IBM in the desktop market, forcing MS into a pure application-construction role as opposed to OS development.
Of course, you could be more aggressive. Buying out Microsoft before Gates even finishes his Altair BASIC is one example of a change I wouldn’t mind effecting, and using your wealth accumulated through the 1960s and 1970s to push RISC onto the desktop in force in the 1980s could radically alter the power profile of low-end computers by the 1990s. Hell, getting onto the IBM board in time to force them to build the IBM PC around the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8088 would change things for the better, from a technical perspective.
My point is that a single person in the right place at the right time can change things financially and technically in very real ways, especially given how chaotic the stock market really is.
Everybody knows that the last time someone went back in time w/ a modern computer that they fried it by forgetting to take a Surge Protector w/ them! :smack: :wally
I totally agree, and you would have to be a lot more subtle than that. Buying a large chunk of stock early could change things, investing before a company went public would change things also. However knowing when to time the market, even for a large cap stock, could make you all the money you need fairly quickly. Even better, the SEC didn’t have the computers in those days to look for suspicious trading patterns. Someone doing it today might show up and get exposed.
But as I said, showing up with a PC would change the future way more than some small market investments.
Hmmm…
Does there exist a USB external device for reading punch-cards? A SCSI punch-card reader? Serial? Parallel?
How about a punchcard-to-magnetic-media converter?
Are/Were there computers that could read punchcards, store the info in RAM (even in bits and chunks), and write it back out to some kind of floppy or even magnetic tape?
In other words, if you could do extensive shopping (even some time-travel stops along the way back to 1960 if necessary), what useful devices would you bring along with you to facilitate hooking your 21st Century computer to the info storage systems of the day?
How about input devices? Printers? Display or output devices? Presumably you’d arrive with a monitor and keyboard (or just take the laptop and make it easy) but what would it conceivably interface with, even given the use of an intermediary computer to do transitional connectivity?
Maybe, maybe not. (I’m guessing yes, simply from the volume of dusty decks out there.) But you could build one without that much hassle using modern technology and bring it back with you.
Yes. Magnetic tapes have been around a long time. It isn’t hard to imagine some IBM machine needing to read COBOL programs from the 1960s on punchcards and data from a decade or so later on magnetic tapes of some description.
I can’t think of anything right now. Nobody still sells punch card readers, and modern peripherals don’t match up to anything they had then very well. You’d probably need to build a lot of what you bring back with you, since 40-year-old hardware isn’t exactly reliable.
Plus, the connector standards developed for microcomputers don’t always exist for higher-end machines.
You’d need to write conversion software to translate your ASCII files to Hollerith or FIELDATA or whatever encoding that specific shop was using in those heady days when text files from one machine were completly unreadable on another. (ASCII was proposed in 1963 and the standard was completed in 1968.)
You’d need software to drive some really ancient (to us) disk drives (think something the size of a washing machine and a capacity measured in tens of kilowords) and printers of various descriptions. I don’t know if detailed technical information still exists for such hardware, and you’d need plenty of detailed docs to write device drivers.
Of course, you’d need tons of different connectors. Hardware designers weren’t concerned with standardization: If your computer upgrade forced you to buy a whole passel of peripherals again, so much the better for them! The 9-pin serial port probably didn’t exist then, and nothing but nothing could handle USB. (Hell, the eight-bit byte didn’t exist then for some machines. This will make handling ASCII very interesting.) Commoditized hardware would probably be a quaint, anticompetitive idea to most computermakers of the time.
In short, you’d turn your machine into an unholy kludge to handle all of the different types of peripheral hardware you’d come across since a lot of it challenges assumptions implicit in modern hardware design for decades. Bytes don’t universally exist (most machines of the time are word-oriented) and certainly cannot be counted upon to be eight bits wide, there is no single standard for anything (ANSI terminals don’t exist, and teletypes aren’t built around a single standard), and the speed and reliability modern software expects simply doesn’t exist yet.
How helpful would it really be to have a punchcard reader? How much data existed on punchcards in 1960? Megabytes? Gigabytes? I’m no software engineer, but it seems like it’d be easier to bring back some good programming textbooks (or maybe a good programmer; I’m sure they’d get a kick out of talking to one another) and write new software designed to run with the modern hardware.
After a bit of googling, it seems that Cardamation produces/sells card readers for 80-column cards and aperture cards with a serial connection for use with IBM-compatible DOS PCs. How long had the IBM 80-column standard been around by 1960? One site says they were introduced in 1928, but that seems a bit early.
Now that’s cool. These guys also sell a card punch! Bringing these with you ( the speeds quoted make me think they’re probably big) would solve most of your interface problems, since anything not on cards could be put on cards.
Bringing a big mag tape drive would do it also, but I don’t know if the formatting is the same as it was back then. Punch cards are. They’ve been pretty standard since Hollerith used them for the census in the late 19th century. Punch cards are the size they are since they were made the same size as the dollar bill back then. I’m sure the 80 columns are standard, since Fortran predates 1960 by a lot.
The thing is, you have already made those “changes” in the past. I call it Past-Tense Determinism.
Not in the future where I have the stock prices, I didn’t. Either you have to assume that you can’t change the past, in which case this is all moot, or assume that you can, in which case the future you came from will not be the same as it was, and you can’t rely on any predictions from that future that could possibly have been influenced by the changes you are about to make.
The most comfortable model for this is the ‘many worlds’ model - every quantum choice involves the creation of a new universe. An infinite number of them. In this model, going back in time just creates more new universes - ones in which time travel happened. Your ‘original’ future is still there, but it may bear little or absolutely no resemblence to the future that is about to happen in the universe where you took back your PC to 1960.
When you are in the present looking backwards to the past, everything that did happen happened, and everything that didn’t happen didn’t happent. Which means that if I went back in time, either now or sometime in the future, then I already was in the past and ipso facto whatever “changes” were possible have already taken place and nothing is different from what it “should” be.
This is one piece of evidence, to me anyway, that backwards time travel (to at least this point in time or previous) is impossible, or unlikely, since we don’t have evidence of any traveller in our history.