where is john titor?

Wow, what a quick conversion. It almost as if …… meh not worth it. For the record if you had ever bothered to read the story you would of noted that Titor didnt just come back to get a regular ol computer. It had to be modified by the grand father who was an engineer on the project mercury team. What those modifications were was never specified. So it wasn't just a matter of emulation but also of modification on an original device with the assistance of someone who built the original.
 
The IBM 5100 was used to translate UNIX systems that might have a bug that could make them stop working on January 19, 2038, which will exceed the 32 bits of overflow to represent that date. post the link where you say him had to "modify" it with his grandfather. from what I read I had to go back to get the IBM from his grandfather and not modify it. this is what I read .. I do not know if there are various versions of the story.
 
The problem, which technically was a plausible issue, was that after the war they had no source code for much of the legacy code that ran their infrastructure. They were basically running on systems built many decades earlier. But with the 2038 issue, their infrastructure would crash. What made the 5100 useful was it's ability to debug the software that was already compiled and in use. The 5100 allowed them to essentially reverse engineer the code and fix the defect even though they didn't have the source code.
 
yes! exactly .. without source code .. he only needed an ibm 5100 to translate UNIX

and it was enough for him to know the hidden functions of the computer without modifying it ..
 
Well, he said he had no idea how to do it. Hell, I have a masters degree in computer science and I am not sure how exactly that thing works. They seem to have built an emulator at the hardware level. Not really sure. I am an AI guy, not a legacy code guy.
 
And in the end, when the next mass extinction happens and humanity (or some other version of intelligent entities) rises from the ashes, they'll dig stuff out of the ground and try to interpret what "001000101001111000101110" means.
 
Iam not certain when those "wars" were supposed to have started, but i do feel certain that for "example" in 2028, Quantum Computers would be a reality and function at levels which could re-create in their entirety and even beyond, any program such as UNIX..

I dont know if JT ever mentioned Quantum Computers, but i do feel if he was infact a bona fide Time-Traveller, he would have been fully aware of such computational systems, and would never have needed to return to 1975...

The reason why i do feel so certain, is because the ability to travel back in time "in itself", far exceeds any need to pick up an IBM 360, which JT could have purchased anytime in the 1970s, when those computers were on general release to the public (y)..
 
If I remember correctly, the civil war started in 2008, and the nuclear war not many years after. Quantum computers wouldn't solve this problem one bit either.
 

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