StarDestroyer.Net BBS

In this scenario some aliens on a long range take note of humanity in the 19th century and decide to give mankind a bit of a boost. As such, on the night of January 24th, 1845 a strange device falls from the sky and touches down some 38 km from Sidney Australia. Leaving aside its flower bud shaped outer container what it has inside is a disc shaped device about 12 meters across and 4 meters tall. it has a number of tread pods. It also has a small fleet of drones which gather minerals from the surrounding environment and feed it into a hopper, which it refines into raw materials and feeds into chemical synthesizers and advanced 3D printers. When some guys investigate it has already produced it's first sixty four laptops and has a video which displays their function (which is it's daily output) in a box with some accessories. Said laptops have the following features/accessories...

• 5 gigabytes of RAM
• 10 terabytes of memory
• 32 cm screen
• 2.5 kilogram weight
• Solar panels for charging (75% efficiency) plus a modular power adapter.
• 24 hour battery life
• Camera
• Microphone
• Speaker system
• Remote mouse and touchpad
• Hardened casing resistant to wear and tear
• Transmitter capacity allowing it to exchange information with other such laptops at a range of up to 500 meters
• A graphic interface operating system
• A set of programs which include a word processor, a calculator, video and audio recording and editing program, an astronomical program, a 1845 version of google maps, a handy help document which includes some basics on how it operates (explaining transistors, logic gates, modules, processors, radio, speaker systems, memory, computer programming 101 and so forth), a drawing program, an antivirus program and a program for writing new programs.
• A basic black and white laser printer which can accept the pen ink that they have at the time and print with it.

The Australian Colonials who find this are not idiots who smash the machine and it's products and instead its taken on behalf of the colonial government (after paying off ten thousand pounds) and begin turning out laptops to send both to the Royal Society, the Queen as well as for sale. All it needs to make computers is iron, copper and silicon as well as water to power it's internal fusion reactor.

What happens?

Zor

The devices for a long time will be kept carefully only in the hands of the important, rich and powerful such as the royal family and their use limited to their benefit. It's existence will be kept secret.

A lot of mathematicians get very, very busy inventing and refining techniques for using brute-force number crunching to solve differential equations and model systems. Most of those techniques, historically, did not exist until the 20th century because there was no demand for them. There's no point in inventing finite element analysis if you don't have at least a horde of little old ladies with adding machines to model the individual elements, and it doesn't really start to pay off without programmable computers of some kind.

Now there's a computing machine that makes it stupidly easy to do this, assuming someone can learn to program. Suddenly, it will become desirable to do it.

We sit in awe at a 24 hour battery for a laptop (3-4KWh) that can be made out of only iron, silicon and copper and weigh a fraction of 2.5kg

In general human civilization leap frogs past where we are currently with magic computers. By 1900 we are likely at modern day tech levels in some sectors... It will be interesting as WW1 might happen with far superiod computing powers.

How fast is the production, assuming resources are available? Is the max output 1/hour, 1/day, 1/minute? Is this the equivalent of a major factory or an artisan shop?
Because that matters quite a bit.

Titan Uranus wrote:How fast is the production, assuming resources are available? Is the max output 1/hour, 1/day, 1/minute? Is this the equivalent of a major factory or an artisan shop?
Because that matters quite a bit.

Sixty four per day.

Zor

500m range transmission, at 64 new posts that can be installed a day. vastly inferior to the telegraph cable, and the first trans atlantic cable must have already been in planning stages (first messgae on it was 1858 and now is 1845).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1845

we're in that period where there's a spate of collapses of bridges, so there is huge demand for improvements on that side. Brunel's steamship Great Britian is on its maiden voyage, so Isambard Kickass Brunel might be all at sea for the duration of the excitement.

The great hunger is just starting in Ireland. There will be talk of demographics and malthus and needs for better poplaution and food production projections. At the same time the corn ships will still leave dublin and millions of irish will be worked to death building the famine roads.

In paris the search for Neptune starts with Urbain Le Verrier's memoir. I wonder how quickly a single astonomer faced with an obediant programmable machine could sift the data?

texas and florida join the union, but who cares.