This week we begin a two-part episode where I describe how I would change history if I could go back in time. This fantasy/mental exercise was going to be the basis of a sci-fi novel I might write someday.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 34 of Contemplating Life.

I always hated history class in school which is strange because as a topic, I greatly enjoy history. History classes in school test you on what I believe are inconsequential aspects of history. Things like the date something occurred or even its exact location are often not important. I’m more interested in the cause and consequence of a historical event.

I have a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle when it comes to history. I can tell you when was the War of 1812 but I don’t know where it was fought. I know where the Treaty of Versailles was signed but I don’t remember the date. Okay, bad joke.

But seriously… For me, the details are not as important as the context. History classes expect rote memorization of facts and don’t always seem to care as much about context as I wish they did.

I’ve always believed that the adage “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Apparently, it was originated by Spanish philosopher George Santayana but most remember it from a speech given by Winston Churchill in 1948. Regardless of its origin, I’ve always heeded its warning and studied history for that reason.

Last week I discussed several major historical events that I’ve lived through because I think reflecting on history is an important way of contemplating life.

As regular listeners know, I’m a huge fan of science fiction and an aspiring science fiction writer. One of the most popular sub-genres of science fiction is the time travel story. Typically someone invents a Time Machine and wants to travel to the past or the future out of curiosity. However, most time travel stories involve someone who wants to change the past. They want to rewrite history and “fix” whatever’s wrong with it.

For this episode and the next one, and want to talk about what I would change in history during my lifetime if I could and speculate on how I might do it. It’s a bit of fantasy that I’ve engaged in over the years on sleepless nights. I hoped that someday I might be able to turn this mental exercise into a sci-fi novel. Spoiler… It isn’t going to work. But I want to tell you about it anyway and why it won’t work.

When contemplating my own life and attempting to learn from my own history, I think it might be useful to consider what I might have done differently if I had the opportunity to do things over again. How can I avoid mistakes of the past? What have I done wrong that needs to be set right?

After careful consideration, I came to the amazing conclusion that I probably wouldn’t change very much. Oh, certainly there are mistakes I’ve made that I would fix if I could. I’ve hurt people’s feelings, and occasionally sadly I’ve betrayed their trust, and/or neglected to appreciate people in my life. We’ve already discussed some of those things in previous episodes.

But when it comes to major life choices, I couldn’t think of anything I would do differently. I don’t regret leaving the church in my late teens. I don’t regret coming back in my late 20s. I don’t regret my choice of college major or career. I might have started pursuing fiction writing earlier rather than waiting until I was in my 60s. But other than that, when it comes to life choices there isn’t much I would change.

The only marginally big decision I would make differently is I probably would not have joined a fraternity in college. The fraternity was Alpha Phi Omega. It wasn’t your typical social fraternity. It was more of a service organization founded on the principles of the Boy Scouts of America. It’s not that I regret joining the organization. I have mostly fond memories of membership. But in the balance of things, I don’t think I got as much out of it as I put into it. I developed no lasting friendships from being a member. It just wasn’t rewarding enough to take up as much of my life as I devoted to it. No regrets per se. But it just wasn’t that special.

Naturally, the biggest challenge of my life has been my lifelong disability. It has been irresistible to speculate what my life might have been like had I not had Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Note that in Episode 2 I argued that you can’t do that. That you can’t separate me from my disability especially because it’s genetic. If I didn’t have SMA I would be a totally different person.

In August 2020, I decided to try my hand at writing science fiction. I was going to write a collection of stories titled, “You Can’t Do That… But What If You Could?” The tagline would be “Dreams, fantasies, and the stories behind them.”

One of the stories I wanted to write was a fantasy about what it would be like if I could live my life over again without my disability. It would fit in with the title “You Can’t Do That… But What If You Could?” As I mentioned in Episode 3 many people would think that it is ablest to fantasize about what your life might have been like without a disability. I’ve already given my reasons why I don’t agree.

So the scenario I set up was a guy named Eric who is essentially me. He has SMA just like me. His life is very much like mine. He is on his deathbed on a ventilator in a coma. He hears a disembodied voice who offers him the opportunity to live his life over again with two unique features. First of all, he would not have SMA or any other disability. And second, he would retain all of the memories and intellect that he had accumulated in his first lifetime.

In the story, Eric’s consciousness would be transported back in time to the day of his birth and would be implanted in him as a newborn baby. He would only have the physical abilities of an infant his age so he likely wouldn’t be able to talk immediately or have physical control over his body but obviously, he would acquire these skills much more rapidly than he would through normal development. The first question would be, “How much of my secret ability should I reveal?” I concluded he would want to be as normal as possible so he probably would not reveal much if any of his secret abilities or knowledge.

This started out as an exploration of what it would be like for a disabled person to relive their life without a disability. I don’t think I would have argued that his life was better with the disability. I think the story would’ve concluded that he was no more or less happy or fulfilled without the disability than he was with it.

But then I realized that it is essentially a time travel story. There would be things you could do to exploit this magical circumstance. You might invest in Apple and Microsoft on day one. You would bet on the Super Bowl assuming you can remember who won. I would be putting big money on the Jets over the Colts in 1969. Nobody saw that one coming.

I became obsessed with exploring what one could do in such circumstances regardless of the idea that you got rid of your disability. I could tell the story about a nondisabled character just as easily

While it’s obvious that my personal history would be vastly different from the original timeline, could I change major historical events? How else might I become rich, famous, or powerful? Let’s assume I do so for altruistic purposes. I want to make the world a better place. I want to take advantage of the gift of a Mulligan.

Suppose I can change history. That ruins my ability to know the future because history would unfold much differently than the history that I lived through the first time. This means that if I’m going to make a major change, I only get one shot at it.

What big event in my lifetime would I change to make the world a better place?

In 1963, I was eight years old. Could I save JFK? If an eight-year-old kid calls the FBI and says that President Kennedy is going to be killed in Dallas, no one is going to believe him. Kennedy dies anyway. And then they come back and want to know how you knew. They put you in a lab and study you for the rest of your life. I think I’ll pass on that option. Besides, Stephen King already explored that in the TV series “11.22.63.”

Could I stop the Vietnam War? Daniel Ellsberg tried and couldn’t. I don’t think leaking the Pentagon Papers earlier would’ve had any impact.

Could I have stopped Richard Nixon? As traumatic as Watergate was for the country, in the end, justice was mostly served. Nixon left office and never influenced public policy again or redeemed his reputation.

I certainly was no fan of Ronald Reagan. John Hinckley hated Reagan and had an abnormal crush on Jodie Foster. I could identify with both of those things. The thing that made Hinckley insane and not me is that Hinckley thought those two things were connected somehow. I couldn’t make that connection. As much as I disliked Reagan and had a crush on Foster, I never wished him any ill will. Love him or hate him, Reagan’s massive military spending contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union and brought down the Berlin Wall. Maybe Reagan gets a pass.

As I was formulating the story, the biggest world health crisis of my lifetime was HIV/AIDS. While I might have done something to call attention to it sooner, I lack the technical skills to do anything about it.

A few years ago as I was pondering these issues, the biggest threat to democracy in my humble opinion was 9/11 and the aftermath. By aftermath, I mean things like fighting an unnecessary war over WMD that didn’t exist, Dick Cheney, Halliburton, no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq, the Patriots Act, enhanced interrogation which is a fancy word for illegal torture, holding prisoners at Guantánamo without legal representation and against international treaties, and other nasty things that proceeded from the post 9/11 era.

So, I would prevent 9/11, keep incompetent Bush 43 and evil Cheney out of the White House, put in a strong progressive administration, and fix what’s wrong with the world. You know, typical liberal agenda stuff. It sounds like fun. How do we do that?

The best way to influence policy and get the ear of the powers that be is to be filthy rich. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk came along too late so I can’t steal their legacy. Besides what do I know about internet marketing, social media, electric vehicles, and rocket design? Nothing. But I do know personal computers!

I need to become Bill Gates. I need to be Gates before Gates becomes Gates. I need to out Gates Gates. It turns out, even though this is a wild ass fantasy, I seriously think I could do it if I could go back in time. I know what he did right and could duplicate it. I know what he did wrong and I could learn from those mistakes.

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in April 1975. I was a sophomore computer science student at IUPUI at that time. Gates’ first product was a BASIC language interpreter for the Altair Personal computer. He didn’t have one of those computers at the time. But he had access to the university’s PDP 10 computer and an ASR 33 teletype with a paper tape punch machine on the side. He had written an 8008 microprocessor emulator which ran on the PDP 10 and used it to develop the program. He punched it onto paper tape and delivered it to Mits Computers who produced the Altair. In 1975 I had access to a university PDP 10 computer and an ASR 33 teletype with a paper tape punch machine on the side. It would’ve been a challenge, but I have no doubts that my friend Dennis and I could have duplicated what Gates and Allen did if we had had the insight to do so.

Just because we wrote the BASIC interpreter that Gates wrote doesn’t mean we could have duplicated his success. If we missed the opportunity to write that program, there was another nexus point in history where Gates was vulnerable.

Microsoft’s next big product was MS-DOS. Gates heard that IBM was entering the personal computer market with a new 16-bit computer. They were going to need a disk operating system for the machine. According to legend, Gates asked Allen, “Do you know anything about writing an operating system?” Neither of them did. But they had heard about a company called Seattle Computer Products right up the road from Redmond Washington. Seattle Computer Products made circuit boards for the popular S-100 bus architecture computers. They made great products. I had two of their memory boards in my first computer. They had introduced a new 16-bit 8008 processor board but they knew that their customers would need an operating system.

The market leader in 8-bit operating systems was a program called CP/M from a company called Digital Research run by Gary Kildall. His 16-bit operating system which would be known as CP/M-86 wasn’t quite ready yet so a developer named Timothy Patterson at Seattle Computer Products wrote a clone of CP/M that would run on 16-bit processors. He called it QDOS which stood for Quick and Dirty Operating System. Gates and Allen traveled to Seattle and purchased the source code and rights to QDOS for $50,000.

They made minor modifications and put in a bid to license it to IBM for the new IBM PC. Kildall also tried to get IBM to license CP/M-86 but was a very arrogant man who thought that IBM could never succeed In the PC market without him. He made ridiculous demands. Gates had only one condition. He would license his slightly revised QDOS to IBM under the brand PC-DOS but he would retain the right to sell the same operating system to other manufacturers under the name MS-DOS.

IBM told Kildall to fuck off and signed with Gates. By the way, when Patterson found out what Microsoft was going to do with this QDOS that he had sold for a relatively small amount of money, he sued and reached a nice settlement

IBM suffered from arrogance of its own. It was so certain that it would dominate the market that it didn’t anticipate that users would rather have a cheap IBM clone running MS-DOS than pay for a brand name like IBM.

Inexpensive clones from companies like Gateway and later Dell dominated the market and Microsoft became dominant in the personal computer software business.

Microsoft was shocked when Apple came along with the Macintosh computer and its graphic interface. They responded a little late with Windows. While the first few iterations of Windows were pretty much useless, eventually Windows came to dominate the market and the rest is history. Gates is the fourth richest person in the world.

If I operated a software company, I could have entered the bidding war for the IBM operating system. I know how I would outdo both Gates and Kildall. In a single word… Drivers.

An operating system is supposed to isolate the application programmer from the hardware they are running on. If you’re a word processor or spreadsheet, you shouldn’t have to know in advance the size of the screen, the type of the printer, or other hardware details. But both CP/M and MS-DOS which was basically a 16-bit version of CP/M only slightly abstracted the hardware interface. All they had was the ability to read and write data to a disc, read characters from the keyboard, write characters to the screen, and write characters to a printer port.

So, if you were writing a word processor, you had to write special code to handle every brand and model of printer on the market. Under CP/M and MS-DOS, the driver for those printers was built into your application program and not the operating system where it belongs. So your word processing might support your printer but perhaps your spreadsheet didn’t. In contrast, drivers are loaded into Windows. An application program such as a word processor talks to Windows and Windows handles the hardware-specific features of your brand of printer.

I think that I could’ve written an 8-bit operating system to compete with CP/M that would have introduced advanced features that were not found at the time. There were two varieties of 8-bit processors used in those machines. The Intel 8080 and the Zilog Z80. The Z80 was cheaper, faster, and completely backward compatible with the 8080. Anything that would run on an 8080 would run on a Z80. However, the Z80 added additional features unavailable on the 8080. Massive numbers of computers such as those made by Radio Shack used the advanced Z80 processors but they were running the software meant to work on the less capable 8080 chip. The software was not taking advantage of the advanced Z80 features.

I believe that I could’ve written something I would have called Z-DOS – a Z80-specific operating system that would’ve included advanced features such as long filenames, hierarchical file folders, and timestamps which were not introduced until later versions of MS-DOS. And I could’ve programmed drivers in a way that was not available until the introduction of Windows.

I probably could not have dethroned CP/M but I could have gotten my foot in the door at IBM and possibly beat Bill Gates and Gary Kildall both because I would have already developed an operating system with features not present in QDOS/MS-DOS nor CP/M-86..

It takes money to make money. Kickstarting such an endeavor to develop that operating system would’ve taken a lot of startup money. I needed to get a little bit rich before I could get very rich.

What could I do, perhaps as a teenager, that would leverage my knowledge of the future and make me a few hundred thousand dollars before I ever started in the computer business? After many sleepless nights, the answer came to me and was relatively simple. Before I could out Gates Gates, I had to out Rubik Rubik.

Hungarian Professor of Design, Ernő Rubik invented his famous puzzle in 1974. I was 19 years old at the time.

I’ve taken apart a Rubik’s Cube. I know how the pieces fit together. If I had good use of my hands, I could probably build one from scratch even without a 3D printer which wouldn’t be invented for many years. I could probably carve one out of hardwood. Or perhaps I could make the pieces out of clay and then use that to make a silicone mold that I could fill with resin.

My grandmother knew a well-to-do family who possibly could have loaned me a couple of thousand dollars to hire a patent attorney. In real life, when the matriarch of that family died, I inherited $5000 that I put into my own computer business. So I think they would have been open to helping me. I would have called it the “Twisty Cube” because “Young’s Cube” isn’t as mysterious or exotic as Rubik’s Cube. I would’ve licensed it to Mattel or Wham-O and made a fortune.

Meanwhile, Ernő Rubik and Bill Gates would be sitting around Budapest Hungary, and Redmond Washington respectively saying to themselves, “Gee… I wish I’d thought of that.”

So, in my fantasy which might someday become a sci-fi novel, now that I’ve figured out how to become a millionaire by 17 and a billionaire by 30, I’ve decided that we need to cure AIDS, stop 9/11, install politicians with a solid liberal progressive agenda. But how do I do that?

Tune in next week for the rest of the story of how I would change history if I could live my life over again.

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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.