I’d go back to the 1970s, the dawning of personal computer growth in it’s beginnings. I’d take every single idea and patent from today and collect them all in a multiple series of binders. I would spend weeks holed up in some apartment, jotting notes, re-directing credits to me.
I would be the founding father of hundreds of technological inventions, way before they were even thought up. Flash Drives? My idea. Compact Discs? My idea. SSDs? My idea.
Everything will be my idea and I’ll be biding my time, pitching ideas and profiting off of the patents that I sell and my ideas alone, with little to no work involved. By the turn of the 2000s, I’ll be unfathomably recognized and wealthy.
There’s already tons of folks that had “that idea” too early. Those technical innovations don’t just need some rando showing up and saying “hey, we should make a plastic disc that stores music MONEY PLEASE!”
The CD was created in collaboration between several companies, creating a technical standard, and working with the limitations of manufacturing and technology of the time. There’s exactly zero chance you would be able to get a jump on them.
I’d bet $3 that there’s tons of patents from people who had a similar enough idea years before it came out, but they never went anywhere. Sony would just see your patent and carefully design the disc to avoid violating it.
Yeah, it’d be much simpler to just buy some stock in the right companies, place some bets on the right events, and chill out on the beach before hitting the discos and cocktail bars.
The optical mouse was first mentioned in print in the 1980s.
Dude, you’re overcomplicating things. Just bring a modern PC to 2009 and mine a couple hundred thousand Bitcoin.
That would stand out a lot. Probably better to just bring a couple hundred dollars and buy bitcoin when it was worth practically nothing.
Even with a load of great ideas, and lots of the technical data (hardware drawings, software and firmware codes) you’d have still have to set up the supply chains, and convince a host of other people you have insanely good ideas.
Lots of people had ideas for miniaturization and portability of computer hardware but as soon as you quickly got a technology out early, the time line would change and so would the compatibility issues… You’d soon just be Steve Jobs managing a company creating shit, just with some extra juice in your back pocket.
What if consumers were not ready for your ideas? What about all the other dependent technologies? Are you an expert in battery or glass technology that’s needed to really make the smart phone possible? Are you able to just call up ASML in 1970 and explain them how to jump a few generations of chip scaling?
Probably audition for the Electric Light Orchestra
your mission, should you choose to accept it: 1983. CBS is going to tell you that you only get one disc for your double LP. a deflated Jeff Lynne is just gonna slap A1 on the first side and a few random tracks on the second and be done with it. you cannot let this happen under any circumstances. everything wrong with the world in the last half-century? it all starts with Secret Messages not ending with Hello My Old Friend. if you can fix that, you can save us all
if you can also convince him to move Loser Gone Wild to the b-side it would greatly help the flow and pacing of the album but that did not have nearly the same level of impact on the space-time continuum so we’ll just file that as a “nice to have”
I would audition for their string section, which means that by 1983 I’d already been sacked! Nevertheless, I’d try my best to make the Time double album be released!
time-traveling to save Time, it’s poetic!
I love the contrast between this and OP’s comment.
Buy bitcoin
I’m not a hero.
I would go back in time to simply observe and document from afar. Sneaking a pic of historical moments or past times such as what types of games the Roman’s would hold in the coliseum. An ancient bazaar filled with people buying food and things they need. Ancient Greece in its glory. A real samurai. Times Square the moment World War II ended. And, of course I’d take some souvenirs along with me to. An ancient coin. Some authentic mead. A brand new first Gen Apple Macintosh. A Mr. Fusion for fuel for my time machine if its possible to go forward in time. Any money I’d make from my journeys would simply go to funding my journey to see everything that we’ve done and what we’re going to do.
I’d go back in time and give my younger self a sports almanac telling him to place bets with it.
That’s as a dumb an idea a a screen door on a battleship
Alight, alright. Now why don’t you make like a tree and get out of here?
I’d mail my younger self a list of dates when I should invest in various stocks, and when to sell.
Book: Replay, by Grimwood.
Push some pedos into traffic. Care less what people think. Encourage my family to take better care of themselves. Save more. Take school more seriously. Keep my dog in the house that one day. Be nicer to my mom.
Go Back to pre-civilization times and find a nice tribe to chill with
I like the idea from Hot Tub Time Machine of going back before various things got started and just “create” it myself. KolaBook. Koogle. Kolanaki and the Heartbreakers. 😎
What is this, Endgame?
Smart Hulk would surely see this as a win.
I’d try to get hired as an extra in the original Star Wars movies.
I think the most good I could do would be to go back to the mid-1700’s colonial America, probably a center of education like Philadelphia, Boston, or New York. Patient a couple of simple but yet-to-exist technologies like the addiator calculator, rifled gun barrel, etc, but especially the optical telegraph. I would try to leverage these devices/systems into myself joining the Continental Congress as a representative. The optical telegraph is 100% technology that was possible, but not in existence and one that I think could have had unforseen relevance to the founding of the United States. Imagine if long distance, nearly instantaneous communication had existed when the Constitution was being written… think about the implications of that for communication privacy protection. Might even be able to convince the founders to include such a system to be part of the constitutionally mandated post office. I think all it would take would be to point out how important communications had been in the War of Independence: “imagine Savannah has been attacked by Spain. It would take several days for a place like Boston to be alerted to that event… with the optical telegraph the whole nation would know within a matter of a few hours.” After all that, I’d probably try to help get germ theory off the ground and write rebuttals to push back on the various scientific racism theories floating about at that time.
