An Age of Magic

Any bloggers remember John Titor?

January 22, 2008 on 6:42 pm | In Science Fiction Technology | No Comments

It seems that quite a few do! If you browse around and enter his name in any of the search engines you will read plenty of posts about this intriguing individual.  It seems that John Titor still fascinates many people and so he should. But it helps to have an open mind about this person…whoever he was.

Well, we know some things about him. John Titor was the name used on several message boards during 2000 and 2001 of a poster claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036. In these posts he made numerous predictions a number of them were wafty but others were quite specific about events in the near future, starting with events in 2004. He described a drastically changed future in which the United States had broken into five smaller regions, the environment and infrastructure had been devastated by a nuclear attack, and most other world powers had been destroyed. John  and his family supposedly lived in Florida where everyone basically lived off the land in the year 2036.

Titor’s posts sparked an intense debate on the internet, with some people dismissing the claims, and others defending them. I am in two minds actually. In the time since Titor left these forums, the predictions for events that were supposed to occur by now have all failed to occur so far. Nevertheless, the Titor postings still have their supporters, who are quick to explain away these predictive failings. 

I don’t know…he certainly was spot on with regards to the IBM 5100 and the UNIX problem that will most certainly occur in 2038.  Titor claimed to be an American soldier from the year 2036, based in Tampa who was assigned to a governmental time travel project. He had been sent back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer which he said was needed to “debug” various legacy computer programs in 2036; a reference to the UNIX 2038 timeout error. The 5100 runs the APL, and BASIC programming languages. Titor had been selected for this mission specifically due to the fact his paternal grandfather was directly involved with the building and programming of the 5100.

Actually Titor was spot on about the Unix thing…there will actually be a series of events throughout this century regarding this particular problem. This problem is due to the way most computer system’s units hold dates as a single binary number. From the 1st January 1970 until some stage in 2038 (03hrs.14mins.07secs on Tuesday January 19th to my calculations) computer systems will have run out of space to hold dates…at that point the computer systems will display the time of 20.45.52sec Friday December 13th 1901. Alternatively it may display December 32nd 1969. Now, we all know there is no ‘32nd’ of any month of the year but this will be due to the fact that the system will have run out of space to correctly display time, day, date and year.

This is a reality. I hope, in some ways, that John Titor was too.

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