Suricrasia Online @SuricrasiaOnline@cybre.space

@SuricrasiaOnline thinking about this a bit, '89 is a pretty tricky time since small personal microcomputers had become popular, so you'd meet people prepared to believe that a future computer could actually be that powerful and also so small (and stealable).

If you went back to the 60s or early 70s, it's unlikely folks would think the laptop is anything other than a terminal somehow remotely accessing a larger system. You could probably make it appear to be useless on its own.

@SuricrasiaOnline when opened, a layer of accumulated dust from the lid rose into the air. A post-it note was attached to the palm rest, on it was written in pencil a username, password, and a mark from where something else had been erased.

@SuricrasiaOnline The bombe was just an elaborate machine to hide the operator sitting inside on a 2019-era laptop that Turing found abandoned in a London alley.

@SuricrasiaOnline never even hint that you have a machine out of the ordinary at all, just submit results that depend on computation and some plausible-ish optimizations that they didn't know about in 1989 to do it

@SuricrasiaOnline Ooh, almost forgot - suck basically all of the money out of the world economy and crash it with advance stock knowledge, topple numerous dictators with embarrassing personal and/or state secrets, and predict every earthquake, tsunami, and solar flare for the next few decades

@SuricrasiaOnline Hence why you break *all* the contemporary encryption regimes! Either they're all broken (they are) or you really do have the compute power, or both.

@SuricrasiaOnline can I get a printer with ink as well?

'cause I'm going to 1600 and beating Napier to log tables