Surface mount technology alone would be a major breadwinner for anyone reverse engineering the phone. In 1977 all components were stuffed through holes in the PCB. It wasn’t until the late 80s that surface mount became available, and really it wasn’t until the early 90s where it became commercially viable.
The photolithography technology available in the late 70s was far, far, far inferior to what’s available now. So not only would the IC miniaturization be mind boggling, so too would PCB technology. Aspect ratios, the PCB hole diameter to the board thickness would be amazing, and thin multi-layered boards with buried and blind vias were unheard of.
Don’t forget that the solder is now lead-free, so the SnAgCu solder alloy would be worth a few pennies.
You are not going to be able to charge people for the use of this undocumented computer. What programs can you run on it? Do you have a development environment for it? How are you going to get data in and out of it?
Phones, computer and most every thing exists in an environment of supporting infrastructure and documentation. They loose a lot of usefulness when separated from this environment.
Very true. What’d you do last time the Internet went out (after weeping in a corner)? Sure, I can watch the movies I’ve collected or fire up iTunes. Maybe go back and touch up some old photos, but 97% of my time on my home computer is in Safari, Adium (chat), or another app that dies without an internet connection,
I believe It could be reverse engineered well enough to work. The ARM architecture wasn’t around then, but people would be creating the first versions of it in a few years. As most everyone pointed out, the basic architecture of most of those components hasn’t changed much, just the size has. I think you could build an interface to the existing system that would work.
So we’re agreed that there are lots of things inside the phone that would be useful, even if the phone as a unit might not be quite so useful. Trouble is, the dilemma of whether to disassemble it or keep it in one functional piece and not really learn so much.
Imagine - a time traveller from, I dunno - the year 2170* returns to the present day and hands you a gadget. You can just about work out that it is a descendant of our current technologies, but the details of how this powerful device works are dark and mysterious. Do you crack it open and see what you can reverse engineer, almost certainly rendering it permanently inoperable, or do you keep it in one piece and try to use it?
*I chose a bigger time gap because I think we’ll be a bit better placed to understand the techology of 30 years in the future, than people in the 70s would have been to understand ours.
I missed the edit window, but I’d be surprised if silicon would still be in use as the semiconductor substrate. In fact technologies based upon optical switching at the micro level are already being investigated. What if chips in the future were a combination of tiny mirrors, prisms, and pointing mechanisms?
Certainly germanium substrates are already gaining prominence. 30 years is a shit load of time in high-tech.
This has been an interesting read.
What would a 1977 person be able to get from the camera on the phone? I’d imagine there would be a few interested people in that technology.
Interesting point - how difficult would it be to reverse-engineer a USB reader, or are there still some phones on the market that can transfer data using the older 9-pin serial standard or even RCA cable? Are there phones that one can hook up directly to a television for slideshows? Those’d likely make the easiest transition to 1977 usefulness.
True, but I think the analytical technologies we now have would stand us in better stead for at least working out the composition and construction of a future device - we have things like tunnelling electron microscopes, advanced mass spectrometers, that sort of thing. We’re better equipped to pick apart a mysterious tangible object than our predecessors of 30 years ago.
Well, you’d need to reverse engineer the data flow model, the protocol layer, and communication framework. The USB 2.0 spec is about 650 pages in length, so think about trying to recreate your average Steven King novel from the backcover blurb and you get a sense of the level of difficulty.
It also runs at 480MHz very fast for the 70’s. Plus the phone is a device so it never sends anything with out a request from the computer. You really have no hope at all unless you bring a computer also and you can watch real traffic happening. If you can see real traffic things get a whole lot easier. Still very very hard but at least you have some idea of what the signaling looks like.
I was going to complain about the synthesis of Viagra in 1977, but from here it looks pretty plausible for 1977. On the other hand, I’m sure there are many drugs that you now use for which even if they could determine the composition, no commercial synthesis would be plausible.
Nevertheless, for the phone the real money lies in the chemistry of the device. The simple twisted nematic display had only been invented in 1970, and was certainly not in wide use by 1977. According to this active matrix displays with thin film transistors were just starting in 2001, although on laptops they had been in use for some time by then. (Incidentally, that article was written by idiots because STN stands for super twisted nematic not single twisted nematic.) Just the idea of an active matrix display would be worth millions in 1977 even if it took them years to figure out the thin film transistors. I don’t know what the state of chemical vapor deposition was at the time, but if you knew in advance the general concept I’m sure they could figure it out.
So just in the display you have easily analyzable materials and concepts that had not been implemented in 1977. But you wouldn’t want to take this display to some engineer. They wouldn’t know what the hell to do with it. This phone is worth more to the solid state and materials chemistry department. Of course at this point, materials chemistry would be pretty disperse and hard to find, so some advanced research on who is doing what in that field would be required to get where you need to go.
The truth of the matter is, by going 30 years back in technology, you are demonstrating technology that is far beyond what the engineers of that day can handle. I hate to dig up old grudges, but the fact is engineers merely implement the ideas conceived by scientists. If you bring them something that the scientists hadn’t conceived of yet, they are as good as a teenage movie theater usher.
I don’t know enough about solid state chemistry to tell you what the solid state chemists could figure out about the microchip would be. What I do know is that a large part of research goes toward dead end projects, because they don’t know where the target is. Instead, the government is forced to take the shotgun approach to scientific funding, hoping that one of the projects lead to the advancement of technology. That cellphone would narrow the scope of research so far as to consolidate all money to to one little lead shot that is guaranteed to eventually hit the target. That’s big money if you know where to go.
Ok, so the usb interface might not be a happening thing. But surely someone would be interested in the digital camera technology: the lens miniturisation, the … name escapes me… light sensitive digital substitute for film. What else? Even if one couldn’t be made exactly the same, the presence of a working model would be a mind-blower and someone would be interested in trying to duplicate as much as they could.
Our time-travelling hero would do well to ditch the stupid cell phone and just take bets that Reggie Jackson would hit three home runs in the sixth game of the World Series.