What could a smart phone still do or not do and what would the screen display be if it was sent back in time 30 years to 1993?

Question

A person is sent back in time 30 years to 1993 and they still have their phone. The phone is an iphone 11. It is on a contract. The battery is fully charged. The phone has a number of apps on it including the most popular social media apps and some local apps such as a step counter, camera, voice recorder. The person does not have a charger. They do not have access to a modem. They are in a very remote area but can travel to a large city (eg London).

Answer 1

”What would the screen display be”

I’m going to assume you’re asking here about what would the display show on your phone, as in the OS it would display. If that’s the case, it would be the last version of iOS that the phone was updated to. (It’s important to note here that you won’t be able to update the phone OS version while you’re back in time, because obviously iOS doesn’t even exist yet). Any files stored on the phone’s built-in storage should still be accessible, and things that don’t require internet like the camera app, calculator, clock, etc. should definitely still work. I’m going to say that Social Media apps will likely not work, because all of the infrastructure they use hasn’t even been invented yet, so there’s no server host for the app to contact. It would still show the app, but it would likely give you an error message something like “failed to connect to server” for trying to use any functionality that uses internet connection. For a good real-world test for how the phone would function, assuming you have an iPhone since you include a specific model type, test its functionality with Airplane Mode on. Make sure that both Cellular and WiFi are toggled off (you can do this in control center by toggling on Airplane Mode, though I like to also toggle off Wifi and Cellular in Control Center as well). If you try this, it will give you a very accurate idea of what your character would be able to do.

“The Person does not have a charger”

Just to clarify, they can’t get a charger no matter what city they go to. The lightning cord that the iPhone 11 uses for charging has not been invented yet. Neither has QI wireless charging. So your person will not be able to recharge this phone. Now, if they have a bit of electrical skill, they could possibly make a wireless charger for the phone, or possibly even a plug, but the wireless charger would actually be far simpler mechanically to build provided the character has the knowledge required. Alternatively, maybe a tech savvy person from that time period could make a wireless charger or charging cord for it provided they know some basic things like voltage and amperage limits.

I hope this helps you out! If you have any other questions related to this, feel free to comment and ask, and I can try to provide more ideas and info.

Answer 2

Forget apps.

It can turn on the torch

The bright white LED is a miracle of science in 1993.

It can take photos and videos

The digital camera is also sci fi in 1993.

It may have some offline maps

Turns out you know what roads, stadiums, etc, are going to be built where. Maybe only in your part of Pennsylvania/Zagreb/Wellington, but still.

It can play music and videos

Maybe someone has sent you a whatsapp video that you downloaded. Congrats, you have that video.

If you're really, really lucky, it has Ricky Martin or the Macarena or OK Computer and you have next year's biggest hit. Failing that, there's still ringtones..

It can store 64GB of data

I had to download DOOM (or was it Wolfenstein) over 4 successive nights on my dad's 4800 baud modem. The split zip files were 1MB each. I had to delete some other games. Too bad USB hasn't been invented yet.

Answer 3

In the history of mobile phones, 1993 had GSM networks in Europe.

In the 1990s, the 'second generation' mobile phone systems emerged. Two systems competed for supremacy in the global market: the European developed GSM standard and the U.S. developed CDMA standard. These differed from the previous generation by using digital instead of analog transmission, and also fast out-of-band phone-to-network signaling.

The iphone11 seems to be capable of using GSM network

Is the iPhone 11 a GSM Phone?

Yes, the iPhone 11 model A2221 is a GSM phone, also known as the Global Version. GSM stands for Global System for Mobile Communications and is a digital mobile network that allows users to make calls, send texts and access the internet. This type of network is used in most countries arond the world. The iPhone 11 model A2221 operates on GSM networks, meaning it will work with most cellular providers.

Therefore, maybe calls and SMS would be possible. However, the operator will need to recognize the SIM trying to access its services.

There will be no other working apps, I am afraid.

Answer 4

1993 is not the Middle Ages and you could do a lot with such a phone provided you find people geeky enough. If you dropped by my university (in France) I could point you to a few people.

If you are yourself a techie you will make their life much easier but even without that they will find out.

Charging the phone is the easiest. You would either tell them about the voltage, or they would try slowly from 0V both ways and finally got the threshold.

Communicating with the phone is more difficult but doable. It would take time to reverse engineer, though. (EDIT: see @Abion74 comment below. As I mentioned, I was looking at my Android phone when replying and missed out thee iPhone part)

• There was no WiFi so bad luck here.
• Ethernet over USB is conceivable if Ethernet is present (it was rather the time of 10Base5, but at least the standard was in place - so who knows)
• Data transfer via USB would be fine

If you would consider upping the game by also bringing USB documentation with you, you would open the gates of sleepless nights for these guys and gals. It would be Christmas coming early for us.

You may also consider having an Android phone, which will be easier to work with.

Answer 5

I don't think the other answer is correct. the iphone supports GSM which was launched in 1991, so at least in metropolitan areas in Europe and asia it will be able to make emergency voice calls. The united states did not adopt GSM until 1995 so this will not work here. Making a charger out of stuff available in 1993 is trivial. 5v power supplies are easily available, and a knife and wires would be enough to physically connect the power pins. This is enough to charge at 0.5A. Getting it to register to a gsm network of the time my be hard, unless you take a sim with a valid contract. Although a sim of the time may be cut to fit, all sims at this time used 5v signaling, and I'd be surprised if the iphone supports this. Modern sims support 5, 3.3 and 1.8v. Nevertheless, making electronics for this voltage shift is doable, though probably not fitting inside the sim slot. Anything available in airplane mode will also work.

Answer 6

Who are you showing your phone to in 1993?

Suppose I worked for Sony. The had made the standard CRT video monitors for years. LCDs were not going to challenge them for dynamic range for another 15 years. If I were to see the display, I would want you to turn it off immediately. I would then arrange a microscope / spectrometer to get as much information as I could. You could tell me it was an OLED. I would know what an LED was, but the blue ones had not happened yet. We had not yet got to the point where CRTs would have rivals, but it would surely come. There was also a firm belief that semiconductor resolution was limited by the wavelength of near-visible light. But, once you are shown that the firm limits were not so firm, you can start thinking of alternatives.

When I was born, there were perhaps 48 Kbits of memory in the whole world, and 12 Kbits were in ENIAC. I remember clock speeds first going above 100 KHz, then 1 MHz. It is a huge leap of faith to make the first atom bomb, or the first hydrogen bomb. But when someone else has done it, and you know it is possible, figuring out how it might have been done is easier...

Answer 7

Flip your phone to airplane mode.

Boom. You are in 1993.

By doing so, you just turned off the cellular data modem, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity to other things, which are the key to everything that makes a phone a phone and not an iPod Touch, and none of which exist in 1993.

Whatever still works on the phone, will work in 1993. You can (at the risk of this turning into "how to use a phone"):

• browse emails you already downloaded, but no new ones will come in
• use files that are locally downloaded on the device (cloud will be unavailable) — use apps like notes and calendar that are able to work offline despite being unable to sync.
• watch/listen to media in local phone storage, but not media "on the cloud"
• play games that don't need to bang a server for anything

You can give social media apps and always-connected games like Diablo or Pokemon:GO a try, but you'll find they complain about "no internet" and that's that. If 10 of you brought your phones, Facebook and Tiktok will not work among you because the server infrastructure is not there.

The phone will not know what date it is, because the cellular data network and internet it gets the time from are not there. Speaking of that,

GPS will be extremely slow and less reliable, because phones use augmented GPS, which improves reach in complex geography and greatly speeds up GPS fixes, but reqires the cell towers be involved. Old GSM towers aren't set up for augmented GPS. GPS on phones (and embedding that in 911/112 calls) is a long, long way off.

Recharge

If you did not bring your charging block, the phone will deplete completely in 12-24 hours because every minute it is trying every generation of cellular it is capable of, notching up transmission power to max to try to reach a tower. If you have the foresight to switch to Airplane Mode almost immediately, you may get a week or two of standby time out of it, minus usage of course.

Supplying 5V to the port is simple enough, the problem is coming up with a workable substitute for the advanced USB-C or Tesla - I mean Lightning connector.

If you went to a competent lab and said "I know I can charge this by applying 5V to two pins of this heretofore undeveloped connector", they could probably X-ray it and figure out which pins from trace thickness and PCB markings. Disassembling a modern phone non-destructively is a PITA unless you know the tricks.

5V or 3.3V would be an easy guess, since PCs of that age are already using that. Any PC power supply will give you the 5V. So you could eventually develop a charging cord that goes "PC keyboard port to Lightning" with a T-connector so the keyboard could still be connected.

At that point you would get basic boring USB charging at 0.5 to 2.5 watts. No fast charge because no handshake.

But GSM, though

Maybe you could make that work. But you'd only get talk and TXT, they aren't really doing data over GSM yet, but it doesn't really matter. First, the system is not designed for the volume of data the phone would ordinarily use, and second, literally zero of the servers it would talk to are there yet. Most likely the Internet connection would be saturated by the phone's ordinary housekeeping traffic, and the carrier would get mad and turn it off. Also, GSM takes unbelievable amounts of battery power compared to G5; they've been shrinking battery sizes accordingly and the result is much shorter runtime when on older networks.

Also, if you hadn't already installed a telnet/ssh app, you won't even be connecting to MELVYL or Compuserve, or a shell provider like Netcom or WELL. That was how you did the Internet then. Hope you enjoy command line lol.

Here's a twist, though: if you can get someone to support Internet data on GSM, email will work. It should be able to talk to POP and SMTP servers of that age. Unbelievable. And that would be compatible with the constrictive data limits of GSM, since people weren't exactly mailing videos then.

Answer 8

To me, it sounds like you would pretty much have a pocket-sized fancy calculator/computer that can also play music and media stored on the phone, and has a working torch, a camera, a voice recorder, and can play games! It would impress the hell out of anyone encountering it. It would look (and be) superior to the Game Boy, the Walkman, Cd Players, portable TVs, etc.

But I don't think it would function as a phone as it would not be compatible with the networks of the time. Maybe if you took it to a research university and explained what it was, then maybe someone could figure out ways to make it work. But it's a big maybe.

Answer 9

Also consider that if the phone can't find a cell to successfully connect to, it will turn up the transmit power and "yell harder" in case its just out of range.

The phone will use up the battery's store of power much quicker than normal. If the phone lasts 24 hours of "normal" usage you might expect it to be flat in half that time.

This could be a plot point where the device turns off unexpectedly at a critical moment.

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In airplane mode, the battery lasts a lot longer. However the time-traveller would have to remember to change into this mode, and it may or may not allow GPS reception still.

Answer 10

At first you won't be able to read any emails. But with some work you could read everyone's

The iphone 11 comfortably outclasses the largest supercomputer of the era, at about 6 times faster (690GFlops, vs 100Gflops). In addition, the NSA had mandated a relatively low strength encryption standard (DES 56), which would later be trivially cracked. You can break into pretty much anything. Of course, you'd need to be decent at computing, but once you're there, the world is pretty much your oyster. Try and make sure you download the wikipedia article on the dotcom bubble before you go.

Answer 11

If you're in a major city, finding an electronic repair store like Radio Shack might be able to rig you up a rudimentary charger. They'd likely charge an arm and a leg, but it'd be doable; especially if you have a replaceable battery that lists its information.

Lucky for you, the full first constellation of GPS for the US military finished in 1993, and this is a send-only system. In other words, your phone would still pick up GPS (that said, government might have significant interest if they got whiff as you used it, because the first public use didn't come till later).

Between these two, you could get an instant job aboard any public seaship of the era.

Social media apps are mostly toast. Your only use from them will be some cached article headlines and messages. The former could be useful for knowing a handful of future events.

If you have local storage for your email, this could be a treasure trove of knowledge on the times of various major events, and guide predicting some things a bit more precisely than your memory.

Wireless calling:

1G and 2G actually existed in some cities at this time, but since your sim card is likely to an account that doesn't exist (and sim cards don't exist yet so you can't replace it). You'll be limited to 911 calls. This could be useful for emergency response, but that's about it. It could be a lifesaver though.

Cameras and Voice recorders of various kinds existed in this time, but they were big and bulky. Might be good for spy work since noone would expect.

The biggest benefit is going to happen if you're running Android and can get a Serial-to-serial connect juryrigged (doable, but a pain - again, a lot of time in radio shack - USB [Universal Serial Bus] is a descendant of older Serial Bus standards, and is surprisingly still backwards compatible - for example, I have a USB-to-Serial cable for my older printer - matchup could pretty much be figured out with a multimeter). Android is open source and Linux-based, and Linux already exists in this era, which means if you can get at the code, there may be chunks that could jump waaayyyy ahead in computer software development. Being closed source though, an iPhone will provide no benefit, as there's little to no chance that any of the code will be accessible. If the time traveller is a cell phone firmware developer, this will be the best bet to maximize use of the cellphone.

This last one is huge, because with that tech, because Linux relies on a small kernal that can still be installed on 90's computers today. You could crush Microsoft & Apple and prevent the rise of Google. The OS code syntaxes would reveal ARM architecture, so you could also overpower AMD and Intel. Now, they won't be able to replicate the chips themselves, because modern boards use chemical pressing techniques that weren't nearly as precise back then - that march of time will still have to repeat because that precision came from better computers & sensors which allowed better precision tools which allowed better computers & sensors, etc, and the sensors on a cellphone aren't nearly the quality used for production & develoment. (Though your phone's processing capabilities may be able to bump them forward a few years - or a lot of other industries for that matter - it's basically a handheld supercomputer for the time).

Answer 12

What you couldn't do

Charge the phone The USB standard hasn't been invented yet so you can't charge it via micro-USB or USB-C

Transfer files to the phone The phone either connects via USB or by reading the micro-sd card (if it has one). Neither of those exist in '93.

Call someone The operators in '93 wouldn't be able to recognize the standard the SIM card in your phone uses.

Access the internet Both mobile data or wifi and both are non-existant at this time in history.

Answer 13

Difficult to say without testing but the Lightning connector (wiring of that can be found here) has one pin for power (pin 5) and another for the ground (pin 1). Unless Apple has done something to require the digital communication, a good laboratory of the time may be able to make a custom connector to charge device. It is not that miniature:

I think that a good laboratory of 1993 should be capable of making this connector (image credit). This can be done, for instance, by etching the narrow printed circuit board (technology appeared in about 1956). Mind that only two contact plates need to be drawn to implement the charger, not all 8.

Being able to charge opens more scenarios for prolonged usage, unless you need a tension for your story with the battery running out.