[Az-Geocaching] Time Travel?

[Rand Hardin]

Steve,

The Oct 8, 2004 program about John Titor that you referred to earlier is going to be rebroadcast this Friday night on COAST-TO-COAST radio (KFYI — 550 AM).  The rebroadcast will start at 11:00 PM and run until 3:00 AM — then the first two hours of the program will restart and run from 3:00 to 5:00 AM.

The guest, Oliver Williams will also be discussing the IBM 5100 computer that you've had experience with.

Here's the recap from that broadcast...and the C2C website:
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

RECAP FROM OCT 8, 2004 COAST-TO-COAST SHOW WITH GEORGE NOORY:
John Titor Update...
During Friday night's show (10/8/04), Oliver Williams provided an update on alleged time traveler John Titor. According to Williams, John Titor traveled to our present in a machine built by GE in 2034 (photos). Titor claimed the technological cornerstones of his time machine would soon be discovered. In a March 13, 2001 Internet posting he wrote: 
"The 'machine' with the energy to do it will come on-line very soon.  The 'method' for doing it has already been 'mostly' perfected in the Z machine at the National lab in New Mexico."  Williams cited recently published articles on the Z Machine and Desktop Atom-Smashers as evidence of Titor's claims. He also said Titor recieved much criticism when he suggested Stephen Hawking's theory that black holes destroy everything that fall into them was incorrect. Hawking has since revised his black hole hypothesis, allowing now for what Titor claimed was the basis of time travel. 

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 The 5100, according to Titor, had unpublished features that would allow it to interface with old mainframes still in use in his time.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. (Note: During the show, an eBay auction featuring the IBM 5100 jumped from $58 to $1000.)

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Steve (Team Tierra Buena) wrote:

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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