138
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Extrasvhx9he@lemmy.today to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

Another post regarding time travel got me wondering how far back in time can I hypothetically leave a modern computer where they, the most capable engineers of their time, can then somewhat reverse engineer it or even partially?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] ShaunaTheDead@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

Technically everything that a computer does can be simulated using any medium, pen and paper for example, or rocks and sand (relevant XKCD).

As for actually creating the parts needed, well a modern computer is just a very advanced Turing Machine which only requires 3 parts to operate: a tape for storing memory, a read/write head for reading/altering the data in memory, and a state transition tape to instruct the head to move left/right on the memory tape.

The memory and state transition tapes themselves can be anything, even a pen or rocks as in the previous examples. The read/write head could be anything as well. In previous iterations of computers we used the state of and turning on and off of vacuum tubes as a read/write head.

So conceptually, any time that humans were intellectually capable of reasoning out the logic. Their computer would just run much slower and be less useful the farther back in time you go.

this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
138 points (100.0% liked)

Asklemmy

43908 readers
1124 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS