The IBM 5100
Over the course of the last years, I’ve received a few letters from Sandra and Woo fans. But I’ve certainly never received anything like the package from an anonymous sender from the U.S. two weeks ago. It contained a seriously old-looking magnetic tape drive. As a Steins;Gate fanatic, it immediately dawned on me that it must be one of those that are used by the famed retro PC IBM 5100!
IBM 5100 (banana for scale)
This incident did not only inspire me to write the current story arc, I also didn’t waste any time and made a quick trip to the computer museum of the University of Stuttgart. Its head, super friendly retro PC maniac Klemens Krause, did not only give me a personal tour and introduction to retro computing, but also let me use the museum’s precious IBM 5100.
If you’re not familiar with the game, here is a short, mostly spoiler-free, summary:
Steins;Gate is a visual novel about the self-proclaimed mad scientist Rintaro Okabe who is a student in Tokyo. Together with his friends, he invents a time machine in form of a microwave which can send messages back in time. An anime series based on the game was released in 2011. It’s a faithful adaption and also highly recommended by me. The characters are extremely likable, all in their own way, and the story is innovative and thrilling.
The IBM 5100 is desperately needed by Okabe and the members of his labority for its special functionality. However, it has become extremely rare in their world. Steins;Gate builds upon the John Titor myth. That was the nickname of someone who posted in internet forums at the beginning of the 2000s and said that he is a time traveller from the future. He made wild predictions about the future and was also looking for an IBM 5100.
The objects you can see in the photographs all play important roles in the visual novel. This is probably the first time that so many of them have been photographed together with an actual IBM 5100.
NSA database on IBM 5100
As you can see above, the tape drive contained very sensitive and interesting data! After I had struggled for a while with the weird user interface of the old computer, I was finally able to read the content of the tape drive, which happened to be an excerpt of a top-secret NSA database! Unfortunately, the three most interesting text messages were all encoded. However, I’m quite sure that they’re not as hard to decode as the Book of Woo 😉 For example, the word lengths seem to be very much in-line with those of a regular English text. So maybe some of you want to give it a try to decode the secret text messages by the mysterious sender SB. I, meanwhile, am hiding from the NSA’s nefarious henchmen at an undisclosed location.
I can neither confirm nor deny that this story is at least as far removed from reality as one of the stories told by Faris NyanNyan.
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 Going all-in |
GD, SVR VUWG, XOH XW TG
QLZW RJOG ZNC CYE DX RJFRK
KLEUM JK YH, LIQ XF US PUWCKJ VVGCXFRRAOGFOK YSZ GLZJ PAVB BTW
By the way, there are typos on the first and last message (one on each), but they shouldn’t make things any (or much) harder. Have fun people 🙂
Congrats for decrypting the messages even before the official release of this news post.
r4m0n wrote:
Do you mean the missing apostrophes?
Novil wrote:
No, there’s a couple actual typos, either in the original message or on the encoded one. The first one is for sure on the transcription to the 5100, that O is supposed to be a Q. In the last message, one of the K’s is supposed to be an Y, so I’m not sure exactly how that happened.
Err, make that a Q to Y in the last one, my time to make a typo XD
Well, isn’t it only natural that there are typos in Whatsapp messages? 😉
Classified ad of some relevance
Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 91 Ocean View, WA 99393. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.
So it’s sort of like when the Cowboy Bebop crew went searching for a VCR?
@ Firedome:
Best episode of the series. Goofy comedy through the first 20 minutes, unexpected heartwrenching resolution in the last 2 minutes. I still remember reeling with the emotional whiplash, staring at the screen dumbfounded as The Real Folk Blues played in the background.
IBM 5100. I got to test drive one of those things in maybe 1978 or so … APL.SV and VS. BASIC. The Basic was limited to 64 char, but the APL could got usual 320 (or was it 360) char. “Emulated” the S/370 instruction set (well most of it any way), and the tape drive was actually really good. And it was actually quite fast (compared time sharing on our overworked S370/158 running MVS/MVT – with TSO in one partition, APL in another, and a couple for “batch” jobs via HASP/JES II. Probably 3300 or more timeshare users) – Compared to that … it was super fast (except for the tape drive). The bad things was not that it was like 50 lbs, but that it cost so much. I turned it down because of the cost and the small screen size, and the short line length of the VS.BASIC lines. For us it was just not cost effective…but I would LOVE to have one now…as long as the tape drive worked and it had APL.
You know, I’m more interested in where I could get the Lab Mem pin and the Metal Upa since I love little prop replicas and other such things from games and movies.
@ mateo360:
I remember my dad purchased the physical special edition of Steins;gate a few years back because it came with lab member pins, and you couldn’t just download those
Is that last photo your hand before you rush over to help Klemens Krause who’s just had a heart attack becuase there is a bottle of very sugary, very dangerous fizzy drink near the open keyboard of the old and very hard to replace IBM 5100 ?
neato
need to find one of these
When did this come out?
Thanks for these! Always surprised how easy some short strings (even r4m0n’s, ok, same keywords but still…) decode and the book of woo just won’t surrender.
r4m0n, how did you get to the article before the official release?
Narga wrote:
Patreon contributors usually get the strips/posts a few days before they are publicly released, and this one was in the queue 🙂
Novil wrote:
According to the switch-state, the computer is set to it’s BASIC-mode. APL would have been the greater challenge. 😉
Holy cow that is so cool. 😀 /jealous
O MAN. I haven’t seen on of those since my commodore days. And it works!!!!!!!!!!!. Neat.
P.s. Love the comic
@ r4m0n:
It is obvious to me what that really is. Considering he could afford it back then – this is Bill Cosby’s “encrypted Little BlackBook” – of which women were given which barbiturates and instead of passing out – convulsed as they vomited on the floor. — and “PSUUM EOYAX” ???
“EOYax! Dat be some good PSUUM when they shake and puke like that!!”
If any presidential pardon is going to happen – it will come from Trump, right after he grabs one of the accusers by her kitty and says “You loved it in 1980… you love it now, don’t you!” *
*The NSA agrees. The CIA is working with the FSB to get those “Golden Shower” videos. Those videos will be the reason they have a giant party in Switzerland and merge — and launch an embarrassing website for all the REAL NEWS they have collected over the past 60 years. Only Russian & US cryptologists will be on the ISS from now on – to watch politicians and celebrities in real time with the giant Hubble like telescopes that the US has that look down, not at stars. Russian pico wave technology will be used to scan buildings, through steel and concrete to catch them all in the act with Russian Honey Traps!
Instead of worrying about Trump & Putin, people will all stay home around the world as “America & Russia’s Funniest Home Videos” becomes the top hit TV show EVER – hosted by Japanese Game Show hosts and of course! – Japanese women wearing only shaving cream.
Excuse me for one moment. I need to wipe the drool off my face…
Makes a great mix-up with the digital comic: Basiccomic.
The Basic Comic is about awesomeness… A combined story arc from both parties would be so ‘AWESOME’!!!
Anyway: this is your personal timetravel, Novil?
“It contains a few encoded messages that shouldn’t be too hard to decode for hobby cryptographs.”
Uhm, no. Sorry. Shame on me, but I could not even discover yet which kind of encryption it is. Certainly not the trivial ones like Caesarian Shift or Atbash. If there is an alphabet substitution or a key based encryption, I would not be able to guess the key or the rule to build the substitution alphabet. I could take “NSA” for a hint to think about Columnar Transposition, it doesn’t look like scrambled positions, rather like character substitutions (too many occurences of usually rare characters).
Could you at least point me to the method(s), r4m0n?
LigH wrote:
I’ll confirm that it’s a keyed encryption technique, but it isn’t anything that would need a computer to run, you can code/decode it by hand with a piece of paper and a few minutes.
Now, to decode it, a computer is pretty handy. Personally, I just guessed a couple of the message keys and hit it, and used some more proper cryptanalysis to get the last key. If you can guess the encryption technique, it can be done automatically with a computer with 0 knowledge of what the key can be, and I probably should write a post on how to do it.
I’ll give you guys a couple more weeks to try to break the code, and then write up a full walk-through on how I went about cracking this, and write a bit of fully automated code to do that 🙂
Seems like the organization almost succeeded in cutting the Dr.Pepper supply for Germany and fooling the public with an alternate recipe containing only half sugar. It’s unbearable what the license holder Krombacher expecting us Germans to drink. Of course I will not submit. I still have a supply of the original stuff that helps me fighting for chaos. Do not buy the German fake! Look for imported Dr.Pepper! El Psy Kongroo.
If they need an IBM-5100 so badly, but the hardware is difficult to obtain, why not just use an emulator? Do they need specialized hardware as well?
@ Agarax:
The science adventures by 5pb. and Nitroplus are loosely based on some real events. At the beginning of this millennium there was a self-proclaimed time traveler named John Titor who appeared in some internet forums and stated, that he was looking for an IBM-5100 (as mentioned above). He explained that there was some hidden and undocumented functionality for backward compatibility with older mainframe computers. IBM-technicians only then admitted that this was actually true. Of course John Titor was an elaborate prank and his story has a few holes in it. Nevertheless he must have had some inside information on IBM.
Most of the scientific explanations in steins;gate are awfully whacky (black-hole-data-compression and gender-bending-text-messages) but that’s not the point. The characters are just adorable, story is almost flawless and it introduces an amazing concept to solve the grandfather-paradoxon in story-telling. I don’t want to tell you right now, because it would spoil the fun.
@ asdf:
Nice review. I definitely want to read/watch it now. 🙂
Thanks.
Wow, that takes me back. I remember see the original ads in various computer magazines when it first came out. Yeah, I’m an old geek.
I just wanted to say, I have enjoyed your comic and Gaia as well (Found it recently), but honestly I think sometimes I am just not smart (or educated) enough to get all the jokes.
Not a complaint, just an observation.
Thank you for all your hard work.
David
You live near Stuttgart? Neat! I know someone who studies there, in Vaihingen. 🙂
Ponies! =D
I like the banana used for size comparison. Reminds me of Oliver’s “Banana 5000” computer in the old “Bloom County” comic strip. 🙂