Butterfly effects, Paradoxes, multiverse theory, and all technical faults be damned! Let's say you have the once in a lifetime chance to take your personal rig back to the past... What point in time do you go back to? What do you plan to do, and with what saved files/programs/OS?
Do you simply teach people with/about it-- School some fools? Scare ancient hominid ancestors with dubstep, and become their strange prehistoric god; only to be remembered in their time as a cave painting? Accelerate the process of developing technologies so we might have a better future as a species? Raise hell and shenanigans, Fallout 3 level 28 Lightbringer(Good Karma), or do you just have a heart of neutrality? The choice is up to you, time traveling cadets.
"Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!" -Ms.Frizzle
(if this all seems strange, and flat out grammatically off it's because I'm tired and because did not public school very well. Please don't hit me)
I'd go back to when I built my computer. i5 3570k and a 7870. It was infinitely better than anything I had experienced before, with my only machines for gaming being Nintendos, and my primary 'gaming' rig (scoff) being a dell latitude with an i3 and no graphics. I went from running skyrim at 15 fps on lowest settings possible to Skyrim at 20 fps with super high res textures and every mod under the sun :P ily ENB but plz be gentle
The question is if you were to go back to any time between 1980 and 2000, How long would it take for the special forces to break through the windows and for you to be bundled into the back of an armoured truck (or an inconspicuous van) and taken away for interrogation?
But also, I have thought about this many times and questioned the usefulness of my time travelled PC parts without details of the fabrication process and I wonder how well 1970's tech would deal with reverse engineering the architecture, I don't know? but since I have just about every 1970's and 80's game on my PC the data would be VERY useful, Knowing all the tricks to get more from the 8bits and so on would have propelled the art of programming to the next level no doubt.
I'd just save a word document, with every single lottery number from the last 20 years, and use the money to go on a campaign to save the world from poverty. A Person with an endless flow of cash can make that happen, IMO.
I maintain that the Elder Scrolls series takes place in the distant future after humanity has colonized other worlds, and some kind of collapse of civilization has taken place. That would explain the multiple moons, the other sentient species (aliens or genetic experiments), and the magic (it's actually extremely advanced nano technology that you can learn to control). After all, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic...
And with that, I believe I've reached peak nerd. The horror.
I would go back to the day before I knew I could time travel and kick my own ass. Doesn't really help that I've though of this before and this is what I came up with. At this point I don't think I would be supprised at all If I walked in the door and attacked myself, but now due to the nature of this thread I can expect the fight to start with me throwing a pc at me.
It's an interesting concept that is reasonably difficult to answer.
On a related note, if you're interested in animes and like time travel then I'd really recommend Steins Gate. There is a fascinating, well-executed time travelling story that starts off with the ability to send a text (aka: SMS) message a very limited amount of time into the past. It goes on from there but one of the more interesting concepts is a timeline divergence, which is akin to the timeline theory in Back to the Future but with a much greater quantity of timelines and an illustration of the fact that the timeline has altered. I digress.
Taking a computer into the past... Well, the most prominent thing that I can think of would be to first beef up my system with added GPU power, go back to the early adoption of BitCoin mining and go nuts.
