On 2nd November 2000, a man calling himself John Titor began posting on Art Bell’s BSS forums, claiming to be from the O future year of 2036.
Titor painted a grim version of the 21st century, a cross between Pat Frank’s 1959 post-apocalyptic epic Alas Babylon and the film Civil War that’s currently hitting cinemas.
He predicted domestic uprisings in the US from 2005, culminating in World War 3 in 2015. In his future, government employees were being trained to use time travel to help mankind.
In 2000, Titor’s wild predictions were unfalsifiable so provoked strong online debate. His story was lent a veneer of plausibility when he stated the original purpose of his mission: to travel to 1975 and retrieve an IBM 5100, one of the first portable computers.
At the time, it wasn’t generally well known that certain versions of the 5100 had a secret function that could translate between the mainframe languages used by big infrastructure PCs and ‘basic’ computer languages.
‘John’ claimed he was selected for this mission because his grandfather had been involved in the development of the 5100, which would make it easier to convince him he was from the future.
Though he never said so specifically, in the scenario John describes, the 5100 would be most useful for fixing the infrastructure of old computers to prevent the Epochalypse: a time computing problem that leaves some systems unable to represent times after 03.14.07 UTC on 19th January 2038.
State of the Unix
Unix time is measured from the ‘Epoch’
