In the annals of early internet history — a wild frontier of dial-up connections, dancing baby GIFs, and apparently, time travelers — no figure looms quite as mysteriously as John Titor.
It all started in November 2000, when a poster going by the magnificently on-the-nose handle ‘TimeTravel_0’ sauntered onto a forum called the Time Travel Institute (because of course that existed) and casually dropped the bombshell that he was an American soldier from the year 2036. Not a robot. Not an alien. A soldier. With a mission.
And what was this urgent, world-altering mission that required bending the very fabric of spacetime? He needed to pop back to 1975 to pick up an IBM 5100 computer. You know, for debugging legacy code back in the future. Apparently 2036 has a serious IT backlog, and tech support wait times have gotten truly out of hand. The fact that his grandfather had helped build the specific machine he needed was either a touching personal detail or the universe’s most convenient plot device — you decide.
Titor — who eventually revealed his name on other forums — spent months engaging with curious internet denizens, fielding questions, making predictions about civil wars and worldlines, and generally being the most interesting person in any chat room at a time when that bar was admittedly not terribly high.
Then, in March 2001, like a man who’d remembered he left something on the stove approximately 35 years in the future, John Titor simply vanished. No goodbye. No forwarding address. No explanation of whether the IBM 5100 retrieval mission was a success.
The legend, however, absolutely did not vanish. Titor became the internet’s patron saint of elaborate mysteries, inspiring books, a manga series, and enough forum threads to fill several server rooms. Researchers have since proposed candidates for the hoax’s author, but nothing has ever been definitively proven.
Which, honestly, is exactly what a real time traveler would want.
*Source: Boing Boing*
Original story via Boing Boing
