and just because I have a different opinion , Does not mean I hate everybody on both sidesI just dont agree with both sides , because its a petty squabble over a game <| sep |> And most of it is junk , to boot , <| sep |> If the guy knows the systems they used in those days , he can do quite a lot of damage . buuuut , a professional hacker from that era would , on average , probably have better odds just because on average he would be more familiar with the tech and the tech culture . The new hardware is very little edge at all . Let me explain 60 % of hacking is playing the people tricking them into doing things that give you an advantage . The weakest part of any system is the people . You sucker office workers into plugging in a USB drive that installs things for you . You pretend to be IT and trick a junior VP into giving you his access information so that you can do a backend quick fix for a problem you created , and then do whatever you wanted as well . The other 40 % is knowing the softwarehardware well enough to know the difference between how it is supposed to work , and how it actually works . The tiny , obscure edge cases nobody thought about when they were designing the system ? Those are cracks , and if you know them well enough , and you strike them with the right tools in the right way , you can crack the system wide open . It ' s literally a matter of if I input the characters '' at the right place , I can then dump a bunch of my own compiled code afterwards and get it into memory , and then if I ask the system to do this simple maintenance task nobody has touched since the 80 s , it will run that code and do ANYTHING I WANT . A more powerful , modern computer ? I mean , It ' s probably a bit more stable than the old ones . It can give him some protection from counterhackers , since it uses a system that nobody else knows anything at all about . It can , possibly , be useful at bruteforcing encryption keys that they expected to take 40000 hours to crack back then , in just a couple of months now . Not super great . Probably the best thing he could do with it is if he brought back some hard drives with rainbow tables for the encryption standards they used back then . Even then , it ' s not the modern hardware or skills that are making the difference , it ' s just that he ' s bringing back terrabytes of answers to math problems instead of calculating them as needed . The best thing he could do is learn the specific systems they used back then , and the methods of attacking them that have been discovered in the last 20 years , and maybe bring back modern tools for those attack methods but the system knowledge is the most important part of that . He could code his own tools back then , if he had that knowledge .