Nothing, they would have no idea what it was, or how to interface with it. They might even end up destroying it because they have no idea of the power requirements. Even if they managed to get it powered up and guessed at what it was for, they would still be stuck with the issue of not having an operating system which is capable of logically addressing all of the storage. And the lack of drivers would make that even harder.

A lot of modern technology sits atop a mountain of other modern technology which must be sorted out before you can even start to think about designing the end product. It could be that, since they knew what was possible, and had an example to crib off of, scientists and engineers could have gotten to that point faster. But, there is just an insane amount of prior tech in front of modern computers that any one piece of it, thrown back that far, would likely just be shiny junk.

[–] InverseParallax@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago

The hard drive controller has a dual core cortex-r that was more powerful than all the computers in existence at the time.

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 day ago

One of my favorite things about what you are saying is modern transistor gates are smaller than microscope resolution at the time. Even if they could recognize an integrated circuit it would be another 10-20 years before they could even start to reverse engineer it.

[–] cageythree@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago

Yeah that or aliens.

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

The power requirements are printed right on the label tho…also they had x-rays back then too.