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daveonBRought on by a late night with a bottle of wine and Back to the Future. We're only a few years away from it being 30 years ago that Back to the Future started... contrary to popular internet memes, it was set Oct 21 1985 and involved, in the first movie, trips to 1955 and then in the second 2015.
For me that's 1982, and it occured to me to think about what I would do waking up at home on the morning of my 14th birthday, 30 years ago... In my case I was just starting the 3rd year at a new school, a local comprehensive. Think the guy from the Inbetweeners if it helps.
You retain all your knowledge of the next however many years it is, but you're a 14 year old living at home.
Assuming this is real, and you're stuck in the past. What do you do next...
There are some interesting personal issues. I'm not the person now that I was 30 years ago, I am a lot more self condifident than I was then and I suspect the school bullys I encountered when I moved schools would find the me now a lot harder to deal with than the me then. It's an interesting point for me to jump too because I was new in the school and the pattern of behaviours that made the later years there so hard had not been established and almost certainly wouldn't. Actually, not being intimidating might be the hard thing for me... I was already 6 foot tall by then... I was under constant pressure from my father to fight back on the basis that he would back me all the way if I defended myself... I couldn't make myself do anything then, I would now. I'd notice things I missed then too... Jo Lawrence and a couple of others would probably get more attention - although I wonder about that if you are a mid-40s guy in a teenage body dealing with girls who you comprehensively failed to notice liked you...
On the downside. My first computer, a ZX Sepctrum wouldn't arrive until November, even though I'd paid for it. There's school work to do... and I'm pretty sure that the O Level sylabus wouldn't present a serious problem... I'd probably knuckle down on French and German, which I failed, and get those better.
Living at home would be a problem again, my relationship with my father wasn't great and he was dealing with the fallout from his early retirement at that point. I could probably do something to help prod my mother into taking my grandmother to the doctor about her mini-strokes before they killed her and she'd have easily lived another 10 years. Dad is trickier... nothing was going to stop the Oseophogial Cancer bullet with his name on it 12 years later... he did survive and with a bit more prodding he may have lived a few more years before a life of heavy drinking and smoking would catch up.
But what next... we didn't have much money, and with a few exceptions of stocks that would have been a good bet in the early 80s, there aren't any short term wins I could think of without more cash than we had as a famly in 1984 and I doubt I could have sold Dad on them. There's a few general Labrokes style bets I could make which my brother would have placed for laughs that would have got good returns... I can probably dredge up FA Cup Results and the Grand National and other major sporting events. I would put some money on the size of the Thatcher Landslide and the Reagan one. I'd open a couple of Building Society accounts for what was to come later, and use what money I did have for the privatization free cash.
Still, that's where I started to struggle. I doubt you could write to NASA and say that they really need to look closely at their O ring burn through rates in cold weather and get anywhere... Likewise, suggesting that Islamic terrorists would be able to get a radio into the luggage put on board a Pan Am flight at Frankfurt will not necessarily be taken seriously until it's something that could put you in trouble.
I'd not be looking forward to remembering how to code, especially on my Spectrum, but I would. I don't know enough about the details of protocols to be able to recreate HTTP... but... well, it did occur to me that a good career for a 14 year old in the early 1980s who knows a little about the next 30 years would be writing some patent applications, especially for weird esoteric stuff that has no baring on 1980s but will become big. Defining a mark up language for TCP/IP based global communications would be nice. Linking is one that's been giving since the early 1990s. There's some very generic smartphone patents out there that are paying nicely too. I'd focus on computing rather than mechanical engineering and I'm fairly sure I could breeze through my A levels with a little brushing up. Even now, my post engineering degree Maths and Physics is way beyond even the AEB A level boards.
I would probably try to gear my life to move to California for some pre-text in the early 1990s. I'd skip my sojourn in Preston and give Claire Eason a very wide birth.
The real question is whether or not you can get the jump on any of the big tech companies of the late 90s/00s that we know and love? It's tricky as the development of the internet needed several significant infrastructure jumps that would be hard to emulate... The internet is pretty damn useless until people have cheap computers and modems to connect to them.
That said. You know that in December 1990 the basics for the www as we know it will appear. The first recognisable browser is 3 years away... do you make the ultimate play? Do what Michael Forward tried to do in 1994 and ended up only with Frontpage (sold for $150m)?
Knowing what to come, is the window big enough to make a play for internet and global domination that would make M$ look like wimps? There are problems, a lot of modern web technologies only work with broadband and that's not coming earlier... there's a dozen companies you know are coming that could make you a billionaire, but knowing isn't quite the same as doing? Do you sit back, earn some money, try to get in on the ground floor of a few, makybe put some money into kids in dorms - Dave, Jerry, Mark etc... and know you can retire at 30... or do you go for the full on Elon Musk at least 10 years earlier than he could?
Thoughts?
For me that's 1982, and it occured to me to think about what I would do waking up at home on the morning of my 14th birthday, 30 years ago... In my case I was just starting the 3rd year at a new school, a local comprehensive. Think the guy from the Inbetweeners if it helps.
You retain all your knowledge of the next however many years it is, but you're a 14 year old living at home.
Assuming this is real, and you're stuck in the past. What do you do next...
There are some interesting personal issues. I'm not the person now that I was 30 years ago, I am a lot more self condifident than I was then and I suspect the school bullys I encountered when I moved schools would find the me now a lot harder to deal with than the me then. It's an interesting point for me to jump too because I was new in the school and the pattern of behaviours that made the later years there so hard had not been established and almost certainly wouldn't. Actually, not being intimidating might be the hard thing for me... I was already 6 foot tall by then... I was under constant pressure from my father to fight back on the basis that he would back me all the way if I defended myself... I couldn't make myself do anything then, I would now. I'd notice things I missed then too... Jo Lawrence and a couple of others would probably get more attention - although I wonder about that if you are a mid-40s guy in a teenage body dealing with girls who you comprehensively failed to notice liked you...
On the downside. My first computer, a ZX Sepctrum wouldn't arrive until November, even though I'd paid for it. There's school work to do... and I'm pretty sure that the O Level sylabus wouldn't present a serious problem... I'd probably knuckle down on French and German, which I failed, and get those better.
Living at home would be a problem again, my relationship with my father wasn't great and he was dealing with the fallout from his early retirement at that point. I could probably do something to help prod my mother into taking my grandmother to the doctor about her mini-strokes before they killed her and she'd have easily lived another 10 years. Dad is trickier... nothing was going to stop the Oseophogial Cancer bullet with his name on it 12 years later... he did survive and with a bit more prodding he may have lived a few more years before a life of heavy drinking and smoking would catch up.
But what next... we didn't have much money, and with a few exceptions of stocks that would have been a good bet in the early 80s, there aren't any short term wins I could think of without more cash than we had as a famly in 1984 and I doubt I could have sold Dad on them. There's a few general Labrokes style bets I could make which my brother would have placed for laughs that would have got good returns... I can probably dredge up FA Cup Results and the Grand National and other major sporting events. I would put some money on the size of the Thatcher Landslide and the Reagan one. I'd open a couple of Building Society accounts for what was to come later, and use what money I did have for the privatization free cash.
Still, that's where I started to struggle. I doubt you could write to NASA and say that they really need to look closely at their O ring burn through rates in cold weather and get anywhere... Likewise, suggesting that Islamic terrorists would be able to get a radio into the luggage put on board a Pan Am flight at Frankfurt will not necessarily be taken seriously until it's something that could put you in trouble.
I'd not be looking forward to remembering how to code, especially on my Spectrum, but I would. I don't know enough about the details of protocols to be able to recreate HTTP... but... well, it did occur to me that a good career for a 14 year old in the early 1980s who knows a little about the next 30 years would be writing some patent applications, especially for weird esoteric stuff that has no baring on 1980s but will become big. Defining a mark up language for TCP/IP based global communications would be nice. Linking is one that's been giving since the early 1990s. There's some very generic smartphone patents out there that are paying nicely too. I'd focus on computing rather than mechanical engineering and I'm fairly sure I could breeze through my A levels with a little brushing up. Even now, my post engineering degree Maths and Physics is way beyond even the AEB A level boards.
I would probably try to gear my life to move to California for some pre-text in the early 1990s. I'd skip my sojourn in Preston and give Claire Eason a very wide birth.
The real question is whether or not you can get the jump on any of the big tech companies of the late 90s/00s that we know and love? It's tricky as the development of the internet needed several significant infrastructure jumps that would be hard to emulate... The internet is pretty damn useless until people have cheap computers and modems to connect to them.
That said. You know that in December 1990 the basics for the www as we know it will appear. The first recognisable browser is 3 years away... do you make the ultimate play? Do what Michael Forward tried to do in 1994 and ended up only with Frontpage (sold for $150m)?
Knowing what to come, is the window big enough to make a play for internet and global domination that would make M$ look like wimps? There are problems, a lot of modern web technologies only work with broadband and that's not coming earlier... there's a dozen companies you know are coming that could make you a billionaire, but knowing isn't quite the same as doing? Do you sit back, earn some money, try to get in on the ground floor of a few, makybe put some money into kids in dorms - Dave, Jerry, Mark etc... and know you can retire at 30... or do you go for the full on Elon Musk at least 10 years earlier than he could?
Thoughts?
no subject
Date: 2012-12-12 08:54 pm (UTC)My own thoughts on it are that I wouldn't go for a massive win straight off - but just getting the chance to replay my life from that point and do a better job of it would be awesome. I'd take the opportunity to invest in Apple stock and a few things like that when I got older, but I'd mostly just try to take advantage of the things I've learned to not fuck up so much along the way.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-12 10:18 pm (UTC)MS IPO'd in 1986 at $21 a share, closing around $27... which is weirdly near where it is today - except it's split 9 times since then... I'd have actually had enough to buy 10 shares or so... so my $210 would have been worth roughly 10 times that in a decade or so...
Apple did go public in 1980 and was trading at $14 a share in 1982... although wait a couple of years and it was in worse shape.
Still not cheap if you're in the UK with pocket money though and buying stock wasn't quite as easy as eTrade... although we did have some broker friends I might have been able to persuade.
What actually interests me is how little that we know of history is all that useful if you just get dumped back into the middle of it.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-13 01:04 am (UTC)Far enough back there's the final day of the 1981 Headingley Test, the day that elevated Botham to godhood when the bookies were offering 500-1 against an England victory and no takers.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-13 08:31 am (UTC)