The Man From 2036: John Titor, The IBM 5100 And the Nets Greatest Unsolved Mystery

[BeyondKnowledge]

If he is a time traveler, he messed up his own history. He succeeded in preventing what he was trying to by mearly making that video or allowing it to be made. Now he has no past future to go back to. 

Warning! Time paradox incoming! Reverse the gateway and evacuate into the future now!

[SomeStupidName]

I'm pretty sure he even stated he wouldn't be returning to his exact timeline. Fun story, people where certainly heated about it. I enjoyed the bent laser photo.

[BeyondKnowledge]

I'm pretty sure he even stated he wouldn't be returning to his exact timeline. Fun story, people where certainly heated about it. I enjoyed the bent laser photo.

It is impossible to time travel into the past and not change anything about why and how you did it to start with.

Time travel doesn't exist now because it would stop its own existence or would be discovered at all times simultaneously. Any time travel except the normal perceived forward motion would contaminate the past destroying the current time unless it already happened.

Say someone traveled back to the beginning of life on Earth. They are looking around being careful to not disturb anything.  They sneeze. That sneeze contaminates the environment.  Do they instantly cease to exist because all life has changed based on future DNA or was does nothing happen because that was the actual start of life on Earth?

There cound be many instances of history contaminated like that but as no one would remember any of it because the timeline just changed as it always had.

Star Trek Voyager did an episode where the only way to fix the past is to never make the time ship to start with. The ships maker finally figured it out and fixed it.

Time travel gets very complicated when you think about it.

[andy06shake]

Just spit balling.....
What if Titor was in fact true. TPTB would also have known about his predictions and the reason for Civil war then WWIII. So just maybe, TPTB managed to delay events, that regardless of their efforts might just still unfold.
Like reading tarrot cards or even tea leaves, you can be told what will happen (Titor) but you therefore have the knowledge to do what you will to stop, delay or even prevent said outcome.
Rainbows
Jane

Yeah, it's a possibility.

And spitballing is what the thread is about. 

[andy06shake]

It is impossible to time travel into the past and not change anything about why and how you did it to start with.

Time travel doesn't exist now because it would stop its own existence or would be discovered at all times simultaneously. Any time travel except the normal perceived forward motion would contaminate the past destroying the current time unless it already happened.

Say someone traveled back to the beginning of life on Earth. They are looking around being careful to not disturb anything.  They sneeze. That sneeze contaminates the environment.  Do they instantly cease to exist because all life has changed based on future DNA or was does nothing happen because that was the actual start of life on Earth?

There cound be many instances of history contaminated like that but as no one would remember any of it because the timeline just changed as it always had.

Star Trek Voyager did an episode where the only way to fix the past is to never make the time ship to start with. The ships maker finally figured it out and fixed it.

Time travel gets very complicated when you think about it.

Problem being we do love complicated...

I don't think physics completely prohibits the notion of time travel.

But i imagine the material science required or involved to contruct any sort of time machine would be ""complicated"" to say the least...

[andy06shake]

I mean if you want to get into a conspiracy or speculation, then maybe as he time travelled back, he may have opened portals to different multi-universes/dimensions of our Earth and maybe he just went through a different door, therefore a different timeline. Titor's efforts may have been in vain if he didn't time land back on his specific multi-universe/dimensional Earth.

I don't think he could ever land on the same timeline, i could be wrong about that, but i seem to recall he alludes to something along those lines.

Which would seem to make returning the IBM 5100 somewhat of an impossible task to accomplish.   

I think by essentially taking the journey, he was creating new branches of the timeline by that very act...

[Rigel4]

The leading theory points to Larry Haber, a Florida entertainment lawyer, and his brother Morey Haber, a computer scientist. Here is why many people think it was just an "armchair" project:

• The Trademark: A company called the John Titor Foundation was formed by Larry Haber to handle book deals and merchandise, which felt more like a business venture than a warning from the future.
  
• The Tech Knowledge: The "Titor" posts showed a deep understanding of multiverse theory and computer architecture (specifically the IBM 5100), which aligned perfectly with Morey Haber’s professional background.
  
• The Failed Predictions: Titor claimed a civil war would break out in the US in 2004 and that the Olympics would be cancelled after 2004. When those dates passed without incident, the "time traveller" story lost most of its credibility.
  

It seems it was a mix of a creative writing project and a social experiment that just happened to catch fire in the early days of the internet.
Do you think it was just a bored hobbyist, or was there a financial motive behind the whole story?

[andy06shake]

Do you think it was just a bored hobbyist, or was there a financial motive behind the whole story?

 

I think it may have been the former that turned into the latter. 

But it was great crack at the ""time"". 

[quintessentone]

I don't think he could ever land on the same timeline, i could be wrong about that, but i seem to recall he alludes to something along those lines.

Which would seem to make returning the IBM 5100 somewhat of an impossible task to accomplish.   

I think by essentially, and by taking the journey, he was creating new branches of the timeline by that very act...

So about the IBM 5100 and his need to bring it back to 2036. This too does not make sense to me because if computer scientists could figure out/design that particular computer's language architecture and programming, why couldn't future advanced computer scientists also figure it out?

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"John Titor claimed to need the IBM 5100 (often misremembered as the IBM 1500) because it was the only computer capable of debugging legacy computer programs in his timeline of 2036. 

• UNIX 2038 Problem: He stated that standard systems in 2036 would fail due to a formatting bug in Unix known as the "2k38 Bug" (Year 2038 problem). 
  
• Hidden Capabilities: The IBM 5100, released in 1975, possessed unique, unpublicized emulation capabilities for APL and BASIC languages that were suppressed by IBM at the time. 
  
• Mission Objective: His mission was to retrieve this specific machine to run old IBM software and debug systems in a future where mainframes could not be transported due to the devastation of World War III." (LLM)
  

------

"The claim that APL and BASIC were "suppressed" on the IBM 5100 is a misinterpretation of marketing strategies and technical emulation, not a case of hiding the languages themselves. 

• Public Availability: Both APL and BASIC were standard, advertised options sold in 12 different configurations.  They were not hidden features; customers explicitly chose which language(s) to purchase, with prices ranging from $8,975 to $19,975 in 1975. 
  
• The "Hidden" Functionality: The aspect often described as "suppressed" or "hidden" was the machine's ability to emulate IBM System/360 mainframe code.  IBM engineers wrote an emulator to run System/360 APL (called "Z-code") and System/3 BASIC directly on the portable hardware.
  
• Reason for Secrecy: IBM concealed this emulation capability from public documentation primarily due to anti-trust concerns and fears that competitors would leverage the technology to bundle or lock out other software providers.  As noted by engineer Bob Dubke, the function was hidden "because of worries about how [IBM’s] competition might use it." 
  

While the languages themselves were not suppressed, the underlying emulation architecture that allowed the portable computer to run mainframe code was kept secret from the general public for roughly 15 years until its discovery in the early 2000s." (LLM)

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See what I mean? 

"Healthy scepticism is the basis of all accurate observation.
Arthur Conan Doyle"

[BeyondKnowledge]

I think by essentially taking the journey, he was creating new branches of the timeline by that very act...

Would he have created a new branch in time or just be following it as it would always have been?

But yes, every return to your present would be more like Sliders, always different. Sometimes almost your original but never exactly.