Send back technology 20 years.
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Assuming I want to do a major leap forward type thing I get to figure out what would be the biggest leap (either by itself or as a foundational tech with ripple effects), and also what might be best able to be supported and integrated.
https://iea.org.uk/the-20-biggest-tech-advances-of-the-past-20-years/
Nothing too terribly interesting there.
https://www.computerworld.com/artic...developments-of-the-past-20-years.html?page=1 also amuses as it is a 2006 article.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/g2778/most-important-automotive-tech-milestones/ has not a lot.
There is probably some medical thing I am unaware of that would do good stuff but most things I am aware of are more in response to other things (better antibiotics maybe, though that would likely just edge them closer to oblivion) or are so small in potential application that I don't know. We are still less than 20 years from the human genome being sequenced but it was already an inevitability by this point, might be nice to have a better sequencing option (would shotgun still have been the dominant approach at this point?).
CRISPR could be something to send back as that would probably accelerate the timeline a bit.
https://pharmajet.com/significant-medical-innovations-past-20-years/ has nothing too interesting that is not just needing time and money to implement what was already obvious (we have had electronic book scanning, prisoner files and student files and lookup for years by that point, obvious to flick it across to medical records purposes and sync things).
https://www.syberscribe.com.au/blog/19-mind-blowing-medical-advances-in-the-past-8-years/ has some more fun stuff.
https://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/20th-anniversary has some things but nothing I would want to send back.
I think I am probably too much of an arsehole to consider this properly and opt for rather a bit of Darwinian approach (evolution's several billion year corpse pile can get a tiny tiny fraction larger, no great loss really -- not like I can make a big dent in common cancers, dementia or any of the big ones, and "stop smoking, use a condom, don't be a drunk, put the opiates down, and don't be a fatarse" likely does far more for those, heart disease and diabetes anyway and was already widely known).
Would probably look to some kind of chip fabrication but it is usually a matter of degree than me rocking up to a time machine with a container with some kind of low size lithography to make small gate chips, not to mention much of that is small improvements that stack up and I would want to have some understanding of the lot.
3d printers and CNC machines are not much different today to what could have been produced back then. Some of the automating software for it might be interesting but still nothing too fun.
Speaking of software. Could send back a hard drive with some nice neural network implementations going on and maybe knock some off the path of supercomputers sooner. That said it was all largely known as far as solid theory, and what I sent back from today would be lesser anyway (give it ten years and the current fads will have gone back towards needing much computing power but getting fun results).
What might happen if I sent back a snapshot of source code for Linux (or a full Linux distro with all programs) I don't know (might want to scrub it of some things as well). This would be early days of Windows XP (betas out there, manufacturers before long and retail by the end of the year) so that could make for an interesting time -- Windows was already a monopoly but this would be still be early enough to bother XP and that was when it got really serious.
Something of me wonders if I could send back a half decent crypto currency implementation. There is always the time and place debate in technology but I reckon it could have been kicked off sooner (folding@home and seti@home already doing distributed projects by 20 years ago, prime95 being even earlier with the name kind of being a clue) and might even be early enough to disrupt paypal which would be nice.
If not a nice p2p encrypted chat program that could get itself widely distributed might be nice. Could go one further and figure out a nice censorship resistant social meeja and video effort but would run up against technological implementations and have to run it as a loss leader, and still be dealing with utterly clueless politicians ( https://www.investmentwatchblog.com...st-40-years-the-average-age-has-sky-rocketed/ , so 2000 - 60 and expecting those to have a nuanced view of technology). If I went back with it then even without the proverbial collection of newspapers to look through for scandals I reckon a modern tech focused approach could upend things there quite happily, but it is also new enough that it would not be that much of an edge for long.
Modern high gate count $10000 FPGA on the other hand.
Edit
https://iea.org.uk/the-20-biggest-tech-advances-of-the-past-20-years/
Nothing too terribly interesting there.
https://www.computerworld.com/artic...developments-of-the-past-20-years.html?page=1 also amuses as it is a 2006 article.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/g2778/most-important-automotive-tech-milestones/ has not a lot.
There is probably some medical thing I am unaware of that would do good stuff but most things I am aware of are more in response to other things (better antibiotics maybe, though that would likely just edge them closer to oblivion) or are so small in potential application that I don't know. We are still less than 20 years from the human genome being sequenced but it was already an inevitability by this point, might be nice to have a better sequencing option (would shotgun still have been the dominant approach at this point?).
CRISPR could be something to send back as that would probably accelerate the timeline a bit.
https://pharmajet.com/significant-medical-innovations-past-20-years/ has nothing too interesting that is not just needing time and money to implement what was already obvious (we have had electronic book scanning, prisoner files and student files and lookup for years by that point, obvious to flick it across to medical records purposes and sync things).
https://www.syberscribe.com.au/blog/19-mind-blowing-medical-advances-in-the-past-8-years/ has some more fun stuff.
https://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/20th-anniversary has some things but nothing I would want to send back.
I think I am probably too much of an arsehole to consider this properly and opt for rather a bit of Darwinian approach (evolution's several billion year corpse pile can get a tiny tiny fraction larger, no great loss really -- not like I can make a big dent in common cancers, dementia or any of the big ones, and "stop smoking, use a condom, don't be a drunk, put the opiates down, and don't be a fatarse" likely does far more for those, heart disease and diabetes anyway and was already widely known).
Would probably look to some kind of chip fabrication but it is usually a matter of degree than me rocking up to a time machine with a container with some kind of low size lithography to make small gate chips, not to mention much of that is small improvements that stack up and I would want to have some understanding of the lot.
3d printers and CNC machines are not much different today to what could have been produced back then. Some of the automating software for it might be interesting but still nothing too fun.
Speaking of software. Could send back a hard drive with some nice neural network implementations going on and maybe knock some off the path of supercomputers sooner. That said it was all largely known as far as solid theory, and what I sent back from today would be lesser anyway (give it ten years and the current fads will have gone back towards needing much computing power but getting fun results).
What might happen if I sent back a snapshot of source code for Linux (or a full Linux distro with all programs) I don't know (might want to scrub it of some things as well). This would be early days of Windows XP (betas out there, manufacturers before long and retail by the end of the year) so that could make for an interesting time -- Windows was already a monopoly but this would be still be early enough to bother XP and that was when it got really serious.
Something of me wonders if I could send back a half decent crypto currency implementation. There is always the time and place debate in technology but I reckon it could have been kicked off sooner (folding@home and seti@home already doing distributed projects by 20 years ago, prime95 being even earlier with the name kind of being a clue) and might even be early enough to disrupt paypal which would be nice.
If not a nice p2p encrypted chat program that could get itself widely distributed might be nice. Could go one further and figure out a nice censorship resistant social meeja and video effort but would run up against technological implementations and have to run it as a loss leader, and still be dealing with utterly clueless politicians ( https://www.investmentwatchblog.com...st-40-years-the-average-age-has-sky-rocketed/ , so 2000 - 60 and expecting those to have a nuanced view of technology). If I went back with it then even without the proverbial collection of newspapers to look through for scandals I reckon a modern tech focused approach could upend things there quite happily, but it is also new enough that it would not be that much of an edge for long.
If Intel released hyperthreading on server chips back in early 2002 then not sure what particular perks that would have.
Modern high gate count $10000 FPGA on the other hand.
Edit
Do they really have much on them that would not have been as readily sourced by say Encarta or some other computerised encylopedia, and maybe a copy of archives of various government agencies?
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the game PONG comes to mind. oops, that's decades ago. nvr mind.
RGB Fans so people can look at it and go “what the hell is the point in that?”
*Enter buzzkill science/history boy*
People have been sticking LEDs onto things since... LEDs became cheap enough to stick on things and look like a computer from their favourite sci fi set, and making a LED blink from a 555 timer chip was probably still the "my first electronics project" of choice and had otherwise been so for many years*. If you count neon (and there was a small set doing that for computers) then I would note the first fast and furious film was also 2001 and car culture had been around long enough to see silliness there. Combined RGB LEDs were more or less available by this point (not sure of the exact timeline here, I remember 3 leg ones for two colours in the late 90s though, but there was also the option to go into a light pipe to fake it).
I am not sure when I first saw LEDs commonly come on fans for computers, might have been a few years afterwards.
I remember some others doing things like sticking their hard drive activity light wire onto the PC speaker header... and well as PC speaker was still a thing that tells you how long ago that was.
*indeed if your LED did not blink some would have thought it lame and underdone. The blues and the intensity of the light might have impressed though.
Or if you prefer
That was Hollywood in 1995 so yeah, hardly a new aesthetic.
https://www.itarticle.net/a-look-back-at-the-imac-g3/ was apple in 1998.
On the other hand scanning through https://archive.org/details/ComputerShopper_March2001/page/n37/mode/2up things were still rather beige, with a few discovering swept curves and plastic dye and dipping a toe in.
I
I thought you were talking about if we had to take a current technology and revert it to its primitive form.
No, I thought you were asking, what piece of technology do we wish was still like how it was 20 years ago?
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