

We Are Not Time Travelers - rgrieselhuber
http://www.behance.net/Gallery/ALT1977-WE-ARE-NOT-TIME-TRAVELERS/545221

======
karzeem
If you couldn't take present-day gadgets back with you, there's a good chance
that you wouldn't get much payoff from your knowledge of the future.

Say you're in 1975 and know exactly how to build an iPhone. It simply wouldn't
be possible to do. Technology tends to come into existence pretty soon after
it becomes _possible_ for it to exist.

Right after an achievement becomes possible, there is a window (say, 2-3
years) where people compete to create the definitive implementation. But it's
not certain that knowledge from the future would help you beat the others. It
would probably help, but that advantage could easily be wiped out by the same
things that wipe out any other technology project (bad hacking, bad
management, etc.)

~~~
mechanical_fish
I've heard this argument made about a person time-traveling back to, say, the
year 1000. You would be so cut off from the infrastructure you know and depend
on, and so i'll-prepared for the alien culture you landed in, that your
knowledge of the future would be useless.

But 1975? That is taking it too far. I was alive in 1975! It was different
from today, but not so different that you couldn't figure it out.

Yeah, you might be hard pressed to build an iPhone. But do not underestimate
the awesome power of hindsight. The great thing about hindsight is that you
know which ideas are likely dead ends and which are likely to pay off. Just
knowing, say, that mammalian cloning is physically possible would make it a
lot easier to do. You know that if you keep trying the reward is out there.

I think a lot of web technology could have been built earlier if people had
only known it was worth building.

~~~
meric
I'd just bring the world map back to 1200, a print out of the wikipedia
article for ingredients in gunpowder and 100 UK pounds* . It'd make me rich
enough already. :D iPhone? pssh.

* I don't think they'd accept my money but its worth a try; reversing 3% inflation for a eight hundred years make 100 pounds in those days worth a lot.

~~~
maushu
You are aware that money does change along time, right? It would be hard to
make someone from 50 years ago to accept the current currency, forget about
810 years ago.

 _Hint_ : Take gold instead.

~~~
dkersten
Take diamonds back to before diamonds were plentiful. Hell, take flawless
synthetic diamonds back to before when flaws where the thing to have in your
diamonds.

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1053r
Wow. Someone besides me has fantasized about bringing modern tech to the past.

Has anyone else thought what, say a nexus one (with my handy hp-48 emulator,
plus shell scripting) would do to say, ww2? I'm pretty sure whichever side got
their hands on it would just win.

Instant artillery calculations, speeding up the nuclear program by about a
factor of 1000, and some serious encryption capabilities. All in the palm of
my hand. I'm not even talking about bringing the cell phone network or the
internet with me. Just perhaps a few cached wikipedia articles.

~~~
grandalf
I think you'd need two to have an impact in ww2 for crypto purposes..

~~~
petewarden
Wouldn't even just one be insanely useful for _decryption_? I've been lost by
pretty much every description of what they actually did at Bletchley Park
(anyone have recommended links?) but it seems like they could do a lot with
some decent computing power.

~~~
jerf
Poking through Wikipedia's entry on Colossus led me to
<http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/news/docview.rhtm/487682> , which has this
quote: "My laptop digested ciphertext at a speed of 1.2 million characters per
second – 240 times faster than Colossus. If you scale the CPU frequency by
that factor, you get an equivalent clock of 5.8 MHz for Colossus. That is a
remarkable speed for a computer built in 1944."

It should be pointed out that a linear scaling is inappropriate, though,
because Colossus was not Turing complete, which makes direct comparisons very
tricky. The very oldest things we today call "computers" tended to do a _lot_
of stuff in very, very specialized hardware, and converting that into a
modern-day, very general-purpose "clock cycle" is not trivial. It might be
better to understand this as a glorified GPU-like processor. Only even less
powerful, as it was even _more_ special-purpose than a modern GPU.

(Or at least it will be better, if you understand the intrinsic limitations of
GPU-like processing. If you're a Cell fanboy who bought the Sony's PS3
gibberish about performance hook line and sinker and still haven't worked out
why Cell-based computers haven't destroyed Intel without invoking some sort of
paranoid theory, that might not be as helpful a way of understanding things as
I'd like.)

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tripngroove
This guy has done an admirable job of appropriating the visual style of Scott
Hansen, of iso50.net / Tycho, who has been making design in a similar vein for
many years.

Here are two designs I was immediately reminded of; both because of the style
and, for these two in particular, the subject matter.

<http://www.merchline.com/iso50/productdisplay.3969.p.htm> /
<http://www.merchline.com/iso50/categorydisplay.2586.c.htm>

I enjoy Scott's work and have purchased a few of his posters. This one is my
favorites:

[http://blog.iso50.com/wp-
content/uploads/2008/12/iso50-north...](http://blog.iso50.com/wp-
content/uploads/2008/12/iso50-northern-lights.jpg)

Even further back in the aesthetic pedigree of this work you'll note
similarities to the work of Shepard Fairey, who created the OBEY giant
phenomenon and, more recently, the iconic, 3-color HOPE poster for Obama's
presidential campaign.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey>

~~~
jerf
I don't think you can say someone is "appropriating" the style of a modern
artist by virtue of using the general design aesthetic of the late 1970s. I
followed your links and I don't see any particular borrowing beyond the
general idea, which can hardly be said to belong to anyone in any sense.

The 1970s belong to us all _†_. For better or for worse.

( _†_ : Certain aspects of the 1970s may not be available until 2065 or later,
assuming no further modifications of the copyright act. Consult your
representative for more details.)

------
Groxx
Anywhere I can buy that Pocket Hi-Fi? Honestly, if it pumped out epic audio
quality, I'd be _more_ than happy with that interface (with more pixels in the
text fields, I've got some other-language-named songs). iPods have been
noticeably insufficient for my Grados, and that'd be a _perfect_ complementary
style.

~~~
stan_rogers
Commercial pluggery is not usually one of my hobbies, but you might want to
take a look at what the good people at HeadRoom offer: <http://headphone.com/>

I like Grados myself, but anything beyond the '60s needs more amp than the
players have built in (and the crossfeed makes a huge difference if the
recording wasn't originally binaural). No need to go overboard unless you are
a can fanatic and have a better source than an iPod (or other portable); the
AirHead/BitHead is better than you can imagine. Bonus: the BitHead is an
excellent USB "sound card" as well.

------
simonsquiff
Great idea brilliantly executed.

Not only is this guy a fantastic designer he's also a very strong copy writer.
The advert headline and copy is really nicely crafted.

I think a company copy style where they constantly profess things like "our
company _definitely_ was started by time travellers 33 years in the future" is
a wonderful idea to actually use in real life for some high tech firm. Cheeky
and playful it would get a lot of attention.

~~~
simonsquiff
Oops that was meant to be 'definately wasn't started by time travellers'
obviously!

------
thefool
Were these "hand" illustrated? Or is there some easier way to make graphics
look this awesome?

~~~
stan_rogers
No, they're computer graphics (some elements are "verbatim quotes" from other
items in Alex's portfolio, like the LED spectroscope on the 'pod), and no,
that doesn't mean they're easier than, say, a one-off airbrush & pencils
piece. Except, that is, that once a model has been created, it can be
manipulated and duplicated (as in the six-Laptron "star").

It looks like there was a lot of back-and-forth between something like
Illustrator, Photoshop and (probably) 3DSmax (the hooks to the Adobe stuff
make it a good workflow tool). The lighting and shaders are well beyond
anything I've ever been able to do, but there are little -- really tiny --
mistakes in some details (physical dimensions of real-world things us old
folks are intimately familiar with that kids wouldn't notice) in his work that
tell me these aren't physical mockups (the way we used to do it in the good
old days). Still, there's a lot of work represented here.

~~~
thefool
So like the cassettes are just like 3D models of boxes with a skin applied?

And the phone and laptop are also rendered in 3D, and then rotated and
skinned?

It seems like it would be quite a bit of work to make that cell phone in 3D
max (mostly the keys would be annoying to produce).

There isn't any clever way of doing the background though right?

------
mhd
Ah, the '70s, the age of orange. (Although complaining about that on HN seems
a bit ironic)

And if someone makes a window manager theme for the laptop interface, tell me.
Meanwhile, I'm hunting for some basic interpreters...

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pablasso
It could help if you take an sports almanac and become rich gambling (BTTF!).
You know, to be able to fund those projects, or you're gonna sound like crazy
to potential investors.

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JunkDNA
This is entertaining. I have never been able to figure out why there was so
much faux wood on seemingly everything made in the '70's. Why did everyone
feel compelled to use it?

~~~
petercooper
Fashions come and go. Why are Apple compelled to use clean, aluminum and glass
based designs? Why did the Web 2.0 crowd use rounded corners and gradients?
Styles come and go. Most don't look particularly confusing at the time - just
in hindsight :-) (Yep, current products will look out of date and retro in
2025!)

~~~
ugh
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Some products will look out of date.
Some won’t.

Here is a record player from 1956:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickwade/4130988683/in/pool-464...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickwade/4130988683/in/pool-464886@N22)

And a tape deck from 1975:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/8944091@N08/2068062385/in/pool-...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/8944091@N08/2068062385/in/pool-464886@N22)

The technology is obsolete but I don’t think the design is.

------
sambeau
Panic did something similar last December:

<http://www.panic.com/blog/2009/12/panic-retro-art/>

