John Titor needed an IBM 5100 because there is no C or UNIX code in it or anything used to create it and its creation had no C or UNIX influence.
It is ``perfect in his generations'' like Noah. He could only take one computer and the other old computers from our time were physically too big to take back with him or were not compatible enough to be useful to him.
In his dystopian nightmare, UNIX is the only operating system in use and everything is affected by the 2038 problem. Hopefully we can create a better timeline for our world.
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Anonymous2017-08-04 4:03
2038 problem
I sure hope we at least kick out these ancient technologies before then.
The insistence on using software made in the 20th century is harming progress. We should be making functional alternatives and deprecating the old stuff instead.
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Anonymous2017-08-04 4:12
>Hopefully we can create a better timeline for our world. APL or Basic timeline? >The 5100 was available with APL, BASIC, or both programming languages. >He was assigned to a governmental time-travel project, and sent back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer which he said was needed to debug various legacy computer programs in 2036 t a time when most computers could only support the BASIC programming language, the IBM 5100 had the ability to emulate programs in both BASIC for system/3 and APL for system/370 (the “system” in this case refers to IBM mainframes).
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Anonymous2017-08-04 6:39
John Titor's native time is notour future; events have already diverged, possibly as a result of his time travel, or possibly due to other causes - time travel and its effects are still poorly understood, what is known is that there are in fact multiple timelines.
In Titor's universe, the microcomputer/PC revolution never occurred, and commercial UNIX never fell, nor did IBM mainframes. Even in the 2030s, the standard computing installation consists of IBM mainframes running some form of commercial UNIX.
Possibly due to the absence of the microcomputer revolution, or the war in America, mitigation of the Year 2038 problem failed to occur. Likely because of the war, there are no surviving C compilers for mainframes, nor is there sufficient documentation of IBM mainframe machine languages.
The IBM 5100 is best known for being able to support BASIC and APL interpreters, but what is less known is how it accomplished this. The interpreters are not new code, but rather interpreters originally written for IBM System/360 and System/34 mainframes. And the code wasn't recompiled or ported, it is present on the 5100 in the form of machine code - executed by emulators implemented in hardware. This is the key to Titor's mission, as it created a possibility to debug and modify the code in System/360 family mainframes. This debugging feature is undocumented, and in our timeline was not known to the public until after 2000, although people involved with the development of the 5100 were aware of it.