They’d probably treat it like a technology that they couldn’t wrap their mind around. It would most likely sit in a lab somewhere for the next 60 years being deeply studied yet still not completely understood.
By the 1980s you’d be getting your first cell-type-phones ,just like it happened the first time, however they would be much prettier and more functional this time around.
They wouldn’t have invented flying cars, star trek-esque spaceships and AI capable of cleaning your home over it.
Don’t forget that the 1920s had its own fundamentalist crazoids, any one of whom could have been troubled enough by the existence of such a thing to smash it, and maybe burn down the lab that held it.
To get serious about that, it looked to me that Spock build a primitive shift register delay line, which would slow down the data enough for him to read it. (With sparks built in for visual appeal, of course.) I actually did something similar for my bachelors thesis, with radio telescope data as input. (No intentional sparks on mine, and by today’s standards it was done using stone knives and bear skins.)
Of course any decent tricorder would have slow scan like any DVD player, so the whole thing should be unnecessary, but the needs of drama …
Heck, bringing something like that back might even delay the adoption of the technology. There are so many steps and layers to the evolution of processes that resulted in the smart phone, you could send people down a lot of financial dead ends trying to get there without developing the intermediate technologies. Financial dead ends lead to commercial failure, and commercial failure leads to alternative solutions. Your as likely to end up with a commercially successful hand held “ticker” machine as a hand held telephone. Maybe more likely. And people think texting is a problem now. :eek:
Take for instance that B-1 in 1900. If they knew it was a flying machine, how many more failures would there have been with developers believing they must make their machine from metal. Without the initial application of fabric skin on a wood frame, advancements in flight might be set back years until scientists realize that they need to develop rigid yet flexible and lightweight alloys for their flying machines to be light enough to fly, yet robust enough to fly repeatedly.
Personally I don’t think it was a huge surprise that a couple of bicycle shop tinker/inventors developed the first successful flying machines. From racing bicycles and such the were familiar with the opposing concepts of light weight and rigid, while still being flexible where needed.
