Post Ajx0OI9mZCaEXSAtUG by wollman@mastodon.social
(DIR) More posts by wollman@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #Ajx0OHPLLrR8DQRo6S by wollman@mastodon.social
2024-07-15T02:48:23Z
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What's the newest piece of technology that would still basically function if you sent it back in time a century?1924 is recent enough to have reasonably standardized electricity and a wireline telephone network, but not tone dialing (or any dialing at all outside of cities). Radio was booming, but it was all AM (Armstrong hadn't gotten around to FM yet, let alone fancy digital modulation). Early mechanical TV. The principal fuel was coal, with light liquid hydrocarbons for cars and planes.
(DIR) Post #Ajx0OI9mZCaEXSAtUG by wollman@mastodon.social
2024-07-15T02:55:43Z
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I think, surprisingly enough, my answer would be a laptop, assuming you had all your important applications installed locally. You could still plug it in, it doesn't *need* to be on the network (well, maybe your software wants to call home for licensing, but let's assume it doesn't), it doesn't need external displays or pointing devices. Keeping it physically maintained would be the biggest challenge -- and keeping it out of the hands of those who would want to take it apart, irreparably.
(DIR) Post #Ajx0OINxiTvTFQoDaa by DiegoBeghin@mastodon.social
2024-07-15T09:29:39Z
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@wollman You could use the laptop for entertainment but you couldn't be productive with it. You can write text but not print it. You could manipulate data, but you'd still need to enter it manually. Would that be more efficient than the state-of-the-art back then?
(DIR) Post #Ajx0OIpG4zlCc5a18S by pony@blovice.bahnhof.cz
2024-07-15T09:39:28.347862Z
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@DiegoBeghin @wollman any office would be made 100 times more efficient by one of those, even if the input and output had to be mostly manual(probably not, it's easy to imagine people making devices for both, if you had the foresight to pack a usb to rs232 converter, you're golden, if not, well, there are still options and maybe it can even be made with 1920's tech still)
(DIR) Post #Ajx5N43fzyjGIIYKp6 by DiegoBeghin@mastodon.social
2024-07-15T10:21:49Z
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@pony @wollman Hadn't IBM or something already invented some pretty clever ways of manipulating data stored in perforated cards? Maybe that's 1930s tech.
(DIR) Post #Ajx5N4bLylfRykJEJc by DiegoBeghin@mastodon.social
2024-07-15T10:28:13Z
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@pony @wollman A 1920s office would have a whole team of human computers if you needed to do some complicated calculations. They used mechanical calculators, and they were quite experienced at breaking down the work in manageable chunks and divinding it among the team.But yeah, probably with excel all you need is 5 people working 24/7 shifts writing and reading data.Otoh labour was cheap back then.
(DIR) Post #Ajx5N5JfK174CB2cNs by pony@blovice.bahnhof.cz
2024-07-15T10:35:11.021832Z
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@DiegoBeghin @wollman imagine an alternative history in which ww1 does not happen because the german general staff is confident in their mobilization capabilities because that one excel spreadsheet can replan all drafts and railway schedules in a minute, so they don't feel the need to rush it when russia does
(DIR) Post #AjxClimYwGo7E6Fhh2 by Alon@mastodon.social
2024-07-15T11:54:28Z
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@pony @DiegoBeghin @wollman *I* don't know how to replan railway schedules just in Excel. Are we assuming the laptop also has a programming language interface installed on it? (It could inspire Zuse...)
(DIR) Post #AjxClkB3kfzrYMimW0 by pony@blovice.bahnhof.cz
2024-07-15T11:58:09.515737Z
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@Alon @DiegoBeghin @wollman even excel comes with a programming language, so i am assuming there'd be a lot of people actually familiar with all the software and such, but even if you are stuck with the most basic installation of any os, it is going to come with a lot of programming capabilities
(DIR) Post #AjxHWp9tRudIQfsgBE by Alon@mastodon.social
2024-07-15T12:18:37Z
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@pony @DiegoBeghin @wollman Wait, another important question, while we're discussing the impact on Germany: does the laptop have Social Democracy pre-installed?
(DIR) Post #AjxHWqD7XOoBgyOlqi by DiegoBeghin@mastodon.social
2024-07-15T12:40:25Z
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@Alon @pony @wollman If we're exploiting the laptop capabilities to the max, we could actually fit a whole library in there. Maybe put in a prominent location a note to "check out the antibiotic properties of that Penicillium fungus".(Ok a trip to wikipedia shows me this would only anticipate the discovery of penicilline by 4 years)
(DIR) Post #AjxHWrQd0fCvT9j4Xg by pony@blovice.bahnhof.cz
2024-07-15T12:51:30.169886Z
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@DiegoBeghin @Alon @wollman i mean, you probably can't just teleport a thing and isolate all knowledge from it, but this feels bit like cheating :) maybe you can only put stuff there that's related to operation of the machine, though maybe you can slip in some ideas in example data or problem sets? i don't know
(DIR) Post #AjxKZv28MYcbNgQ1mi by Colinvparker@mathstodon.xyz
2024-07-15T13:07:58Z
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@DiegoBeghin @pony @wollman There were teletype machines already, so probably you’d want to hijack the laptop’s keyboard to feed those in. For example, multiplex 26 Morse or Baudet code inputs, one on each letter.
(DIR) Post #AjxKZwVasVmTxLD4LI by pony@blovice.bahnhof.cz
2024-07-15T13:25:38.904932Z
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@Colinvparker @DiegoBeghin @wollman they usually talk usb (making the usb connector itself would be trivial, any watchmaker or jeweller could, it could also be done more industrially, but probably waste of time setting up a factory for those when you have one laptop), that's fairly easy thing if you know what you want to do, except it isnt because you need high mhz frequencies which feels rather hard with the 1920's techyou could maybe tap into the keyboard wiring before the controller, that's very easy if you know what you are doing, and somehow multiplex many inputs through one actual keyboard, but typical keyboard do polling at some fixed frequency which is usually quite low, so in reality you could still only be sending like ~200 key events per second, which is not a lot
(DIR) Post #AjxQCnNdFbzAi2pcI4 by Colinvparker@mathstodon.xyz
2024-07-15T14:24:55Z
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@pony @DiegoBeghin @wollman Wiring the individual keys would be better but I was originally thinking a mechanical system that pushes the keys. There would be bandwidth issues, although 200 events per second is easily a high enough symbol rate to handle human typists. With 5-bit Baudot code (using two keys, one for + one for -) and reasonable framing you could do 25 chars/sec. With Morse in a single key maybe more like 10. Anyway 1920s typists would have been familiar with such limitations, since mechanical typewriters also make errors if the entry is too fast. The bigger limitation is probably the number of keys that can be detected down at the same time, which would limit the multiplexing.USB (even the lowest speeds) seems pretty challenging, the symbol rate is far too high for anything electromechanical and you’d need a forest of vacuum tubes.Probably the best pure electrical input/output on a laptop is the mic/audio jack, but that’s only one line so you’d probably want to save it (e.g. it’s probably the only viable output).
(DIR) Post #AjxQCoQrL6A3yLLhxY by pony@blovice.bahnhof.cz
2024-07-15T14:28:42.639791Z
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@Colinvparker @DiegoBeghin @wollman i am thinking more about having tens or even hundreds typists at once, multiplexed somehow by time or symbols to provide massive simultaneous data input, or maybe some kind of devices where you'd pretype the information and it'd be batch executed, i don't think either of that needs much of tech marvelsimagine like a device where you can type message of few hundred characters to be stored and sent, maybe it'd just have some kind of mechanical memory for it, it'd be very expensive to make, but maybe worth it
(DIR) Post #AjxTuxloHYJHXNtQ9I by Colinvparker@mathstodon.xyz
2024-07-15T15:05:09Z
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@pony @DiegoBeghin @wollman Well they had punch tape already, so storing batches wouldn’t be that hard, if you input through a single hijacked keyboard even at 100 symbols per second split over 8 keys that’s 100 B/sec.Alternatively, if the laptop has a camera you could scroll punched tape in front of the camera, but that requires more programming work to do on the interface, past the level of “using MS Excel to decode text files”.
(DIR) Post #AjxTuz6PKSNdfYXNtQ by pony@blovice.bahnhof.cz
2024-07-15T15:10:17.007403Z
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@Colinvparker @DiegoBeghin @wollman there is actually quite a lot of inputs a typical laptop can do i guess? for example if it has a smartcard reader, that could also give you another good interface which is not *that* electrically complex?
(DIR) Post #AjxUYYmOcEUrc833Oy by pony@blovice.bahnhof.cz
2024-07-15T15:17:28.215558Z
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@Colinvparker @DiegoBeghin @wollman one funny downside here is all these things are pretty easy to randomly fry with just slight misuse
(DIR) Post #AjxXYbyH36tRNJJusK by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
2024-07-15T15:51:18.273Z
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@pony@blovice.bahnhof.cz @Colinvparker@mathstodon.xyz @DiegoBeghin@mastodon.social @wollman@mastodon.social Isn't smartcards just SPI? Which would still require a fair bit of speed.
(DIR) Post #AjxY0VL5IhTsukI2yW by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
2024-07-15T15:56:19.580Z
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@pony@blovice.bahnhof.cz @Colinvparker@mathstodon.xyz @DiegoBeghin@mastodon.social @wollman@mastodon.social ISO says 1MHz clock minimum, so that's not flying