[Az-Geocaching] Time Travel?

[George Harris]

I would think that someone smart enough to build a time machine would be
smart enough to either reproduce the 5100 outright, write a simulator for
it, or fix the UNIX machines without it.

Sorta like going back in time to get a 3/4" socket because yours is busted.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Team Tierra Buena" <teamtierrabuena at earthlink.net>
To: <listserv at azgeocaching.com>
Sent: Monday, January 03, 2005 8:58 PM
Subject: RE: [Az-Geocaching] Time Travel?


> > The program that the site referred to was a live broadcast with George
> > Noory from the Oct 8th, 2004 Coast-To-Coast radio show.  The guest was
> > Oliver Williams who spoke about John Titor.  Below is the recap from
> that
> > show:
>
> Oops! I think I left the <irony> and </irony> tags out of my original
> message.
>
> > Williams also referred to an article in Rochester Magazine about the
> IBM
> > 5100 computer. Titor claimed he'd traveled from 2036 to retrieve the
> IBM
> > 5100 in order to resolve computer problems in the future. The 5100,
> > according to Titor, had unpublished features that would allow it to
> > interface with old mainframes still in use in his time. Williams
> believes
> > Titor "went back home" after the completion of his mission to find and
> > acquire an IBM 5100.
>
> I used to program the IBM 5100. It was an interesting machine. It was
> truly one of the world's first "portable computers", although no one
> wanted to port it for very long distances (say, over 100 yards). It used
> a deservedly obscure* programming language known as APL (which stood for
> "A Programming Language"). APL on the 5100 was fully portable to the IBM
> System/360 mainframe (provided the mainframe had a terminal with the
> special APL keyboard that had as many Greek letters as English ones on
> it**) primarily because APL was an interpretive rather than a compiled
> language, so each system's interpreter could generate its respective
> machine code on the fly. Why anyone would think either the 5100 or the
> S/360 mainframe series might be more capable of resolving "computer
> problems in the future" escapes me. They had plenty of their own
> problems thirty-odd years ago.
>
> > (Note: During the show, an eBay auction featuring the
> > IBM 5100 jumped from $58 to $1000.)
>
> And a ten-year-old grilled cheese sandwich went for what, $38,000? David
> Hannum was right.
>
> To be honest, I can't remember the last time I even thought of a 5100
> until I read your posting. If I had, and I knew I could buy a working
> model on eBay for $58, I might have done so. (I just checked, and the
> only one I see currently for sale is over $500.) What I'd *really* like
> to get my hands on is a copy of the source code for "Bugs and Loops", a
> game written in APL based on the concept of a Turing Machine. It was one
> of the most challenging games I've ever encountered in any format. Being
> able to play that game again would be some time travel I'd love to do.
>
> Steve
> Team Tierra Buena
>
> * In case there are any APL devotees reading this, I know all about the
> language's "elegance", and how you can write multitasking operating
> systems in a hundred lines of code. Which is exactly its problem: Those
> hundred lines will be impenetrably unreadable. Give me ten thousand
> lines of GOTO-riddled COBOL and a little time, and I'll be able to
> figure out what in heck it's doing. I challenge the author of any
> non-trivial APL program to reconstruct what they did six months after
> they finished writing it.
>
> ** For the curious, I've attached a JPEG of a complete APL program to
> find all of the prime numbers in the set of integers from 1 to some
> upper bound (defined in the program as "R").
>
>
>
>


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