Did a TIME TRAVELLER come from 2036 for this IBM? | The John Titor story

on the menu today wel

come

and the name einstein just doesn't suit you oh hello chip dippers wel

come

back to retro recipes or if your name is

john

teeter instead of einstein i should say wel

come

back in

time

because yeah with halloween in the air and the halloween computer right there thank you uh we're going to investigate the fascinating

story

john

teeter who claimed to be an american military

time

traveler sent back from the year

2036

especially to obtain a

1975 ibm 5100 computer for a very specific and rather spooky purpose thank you that's not spooky at all

this

is kind of serious you know along the way tita warned us of an impending civil and nuclear war and strangely i only found out about

this

story

after someone mentioned it when they read my own

time

travel novel the chrononaut now as you may know my book asks what if so-called aliens are actually highly evolved humans from earth's distant future

and so-called flying sources are their

time

machines so i was pretty stunned to see parallels between tita's

story

and my own including the claim that in his

time

they still don't know what ufos are but they think that they might be highly evolved humans from earth's distant well yeah you get the idea she can see my reflection in the halloween computer or is she looking back in

time

well either way you know is

john

tita's

story

about

time

travel just a

story

like mine or could there be something more real to it after all as stephen hawking said if

time

travel was invented in the future wouldn't we know about it by now wouldn't

time

travelers have

come

back to tell us well let's just imagine for a minute that they actually have we didn't believe them so just for fun let's take tita's

story

and its retro computing heart seriously because there is one secret detail about the ibm 5100 that

i don't think he could have known in the year 2000 unless he was a

time

traveler so first we really need to understand what the ibm 5100 was or is what will be it's confusing it was released in 1975 at a cost of just 19 500 and one of the first commercially available portable computers the cost of the 5100 is reasonable now the price tag may make more sense when you realize it's supported up to the same amount of memory as the commodore 64 which

wouldn't be released until seven years later yep

this

thing really was ahead of its

time

you hear that and yes like the sx64 that would follow the circus portable making it ideal for a traveler or a

time

traveler it also featured ibm's own 1.9 megahertz processor a 5-inch monochrome display an internal 200 kilobyte tape drive yep no floppy disks here and it ran basic or apl now apl is a 1960s array-oriented programming language that used graphic symbols to

represent its functions and as we all know apl stands for a programming language no seriously it actually does just as pcb stands for causal computer bank vault yep if you need great quality pcbs that don't cost 19 and a half thousand dollars but actually just five bucks then we recommend bcb way excuse me yeah sorry about that but from pcb back to apl apl was actually at the heart of tita's special mission when he logged into a computer bulletin board back

in the year 2000 and posted

this

now i know what you're thinking pull the other one mate it's got bells on it but actually yeah he did indeed post photos and very convincing ones at that photos that to

this

day have never been disproven now in his case the

time

machine was mounted in a 1967 chevy rather than a delorean now yes

this

might ring alarm bells as being just a copycat of a well-known other certain

story

but on the other hand life does imitate art

take the space force star trek logo for a tiny example so let's suspend disbelief just for a moment more because marty things are about to get heavy indeed the suspicions faded for tita when people had questions and he had answers now yes in some cases the answers were kind of vague but in others he gave incredibly detailed predictions of the future and it seems several of them have

come

true over the 20 years that followed first he stated the

time

machine

operated through the use of too many black holes producing a gravity field but stephen hawking believed many black holes were impossible in response to skeptics tita had

this

to say but four years later hawking sensationally retracted his theories on black holes next tita posed a seemingly strange question back in 2000

this

didn't make much sense until perhaps the columbia space shuttle disaster four years later caused by a piece of the shuttle's heat insulation

breaking off and he also described olympics being cancelled albeit in 2004 and election voting being hacked but of course other predictions haven't materialized there was no american civil war well no actually i mean he said it would happen in 2004. anyway uh there's also been no nuclear war in 2015 with russia but he had an oddly believable reason for why none of that might

come

true he invoked the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics simply meaning

that he came from a different

time

line to our own and those events happened in his universe not ours but perhaps what led to so many people believing him at the

time

was his insistence that well now i i don't know what to believe and you know back in 2000 with the more limited beginnings of the internet and discussion forums on the web i can kind of forgive people for becoming so absorbed in the

story

with tita achieving almost cult-like status wow it really is the

right model that's crazy

this

is fantastic lift with your knees but okay why had he traveled back to 1975 to rochester minnesota specifically where the machine was created to collect that ibm 5100 well apparently his grandfather was one of the creators of the machine and had actually helped him obtain it back in

time

and he'd stopped in 2000 to pay a visit for four months while he also posted on these forums to see his parents he went on to claim that

back home his military unit was responsible for retrieving key items from the past that could help them recover from that war and that ibm machine was a key unit and crucially he stated that an emp electromagnetic pulse had been responsible for destroying all of their computers and therefore any remaining ibm 5100s even offered to take people back with him to the year

2036

along with that ibm but the best part of the

story

is coming right up see you in the future now

for the really juicy part you see he specifically claimed that the ibm was needed to debug machines used in

2036

not really so far fetched after all in 2002 nasa did the same thing buying old medical tech on fleabay to use as donor machines due to the intel 8086 chips they contained which were needed to test rocket boosters but here's that other detail i alluded to that nobody really should have known about in the year 2000 see at that

time

theta claimed

this

now that isn't the part you couldn't have known the 2038 problem is basically the new y2k bug you see at 314 utc on the 19th of january 2038 which is 2.15 billion seconds after 1970 computers still using 32-bit systems won't be able to cope because they can't count higher than 2.15 billion so they'll essentially suddenly think it's 1970 which could be a real problem for

time

-dependent systems right right and tita crucially claimed the 5100 had a

special ability to read older languages and guess what he was right an engineer called bob dub who had worked on the 5100 back in the 70s came forward and for the first

time

publicly confirmed

this

hidden feature he went on to explain how the 5100 could actually emulate programs in older ibm mainframe languages via an ibm system360 assembly emulator hidden inside it that emulator gave programmers access to the functions of the huge 1960s mainframe computers but in a

portable form factor perhaps very handy for a

time

traveler antita inferred that it would allow you to drop into what he called legacy code and essentially scoop out information now he never stated exactly why but i could surmise from that that because the 2038 problem revolves around the year 1970 that there's something in that 1975 code because it can access older systems 1970 for example that they might have been able to use to solve the 2038 problem now

apparently back in 1975 ibm kept the lid on the feature and told engineers not to talk about it i reached out to ibm's media relations department and they too declined to comment for

this

very video so how did tita know stuff in 2000 that ibm refused to talk about in 1975 or today well i can think of two explanations first it really was sent back by a military

time

travel unit because all of their 5100s were destroyed by that emp weapon or he or someone close to

him worked for ibm knew about that legacy code that was hidden away by them and tita or whatever his name is used it to pull off one of the ultimate and first internet hoaxes hey what are you doing trimming my bush what are you actually doing cutting herbs oh that's nice do you know i actually invented a futuristic herb collector you did yeah it's a

time

machine also these are herbs not herbs because they've got a bloody h in them all right mr izzard and as

for tita's futuristic

time

aside from a couple of twists we'll discover in a second there's not much more i can tell you of that

story

this

was his final message in 2001 the

story

kind of faded away until that is 2009 there a report by

john

huston of the hoax hunter website accused larry haber a florida entertainment lawyer as being the ceo of the

john

teeter foundation that had been set up to sell

john

teeter merchandise suspicious lynch alleged

that larry and his brother maury haber were

john

titor

and get

this

he also alleged that maury haber also referred to as

john

rick haber was a computer scientist so he might have known ibm's secret so naturally i immediately emailed larry haber and asked him all about it

this

was his response it's also been said that he is actually the lawyer representing tita's family or estate in the present

time

naturally i asked him if that was true if he could give me

more details call me stubborn but i followed up again to ask if jontita was real then just two years ago artist joseph matheny creator of the alternate reality game hong's hat that's right alternate realities claimed that he worked as a consultant for the creators of

john

teeter created as a literary experiment by the people who were observing what he was doing with ong's hat see at the

time

tita himself claimed to have started to see temporal

divergences occur due to his military units

time

travel football games having different results for example it makes me think of a certain sports almanac but could posting about a nuclear war have averted a nuclear war at least in our

time

line or could actually those allegations against him the hoaxers themselves

time

travelers from the future who've

come

back to try to correct the

time

lines but of course tita's explanations for why his predictions would not

come

true and his insistence that he would rather not be believed could all just be clever reverse psychology by the ultimate internet prankster but personally i don't know about you but i want to believe that a 1975 antique computer a portable computer weighing 23 kilograms one day really does save the world i guess only