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How far back in time can a modern computer be reversed engineered (lemmy.today)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The novel ways that we've come up with to make processors and circuit boards over the past 40 years has been pretty amazing. I believe you're giving people of the 1930s too much credit here. Just for instance, the entire industry has known making chips smaller with more transistors will yield better performance for the past 40+ years. It's taken coming up with manufacturing "tricks" this long to get down to what we have today. Same thing for ram and hard drives.

And the code that programs it all to run would be completely unreadable. Much less the understanding of all the code for stuff that wouldn't have been named, created, or thought of, yet. Or how to program and read anything off the a solid state hard drive or the ram.

The first "digital computer" was made in 1945. You would bump that up a bit sooner by giving them a laptop in the 1930s, but most things since then have been just trying to refine the manufacturing process. They wouldn't be able to recreate the laptop at all. Not even in the 1980s would they be able to create it.