on the menu today
welcome and the name einstein just doesn't suit you oh hello chip dippers welcome back
to retro recipes or if your name is john teeter instead of einstein i should say welcome 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 of 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 timeline 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 as 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 timeline or could
actually those allegations against him the hoaxers themselves time travelers from the future who've
come back to try to correct the timelines 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 time will tell well we'll be back sooner or later with
another retro recipe until then thanks so much for watching subscribe and join below and cheerio
you