1999 was a unique time in our history. We were not only in the digital age - we had been there for a decade or two by 1999 - but we were just entering the internet age. 1999 was the first phase of the internet boom and any company with a dot-com in their name was destined for great things. Or so we thought.
We could transmit voice, and data, and image, over a phone line using equipment that could translate a voice signal - a wave - into a digital bitstream, and back then that was still most of what traveled through the cloud. Voice calls. We took that bitstream and sent it over fiber optics and it was great. When everyone got a connected to the internet, all of a sudden we could send those bits across that same network. Pretty soon, data far eclipsed voice as the source of traffic.
Working in telecommunications at the time, it wasn't a stretch for me to think about a genius in a lab somewhere working on how to turn things into a bitstream as well - a three d printer, if you would, but instead of a blueprint to make something, the blueprint came from the thing itself. Toshiro's transporter pad scans an object and turns its blueprint into a digital bitstream. Simple, right?
And 1999 was where it happened, because of course it was, because we were just starting to figure out how to use the technology we had been gifted. The internet as it is stands on the backs of telecommunications engineers in Bell Labs and elsewhere that figured out how to send a phone call via light wave, and then took that same thinking and used it for data.
If the transporter pad had actually existed, pulled from the mind of a genius like Toshiro, then of course he would be sitting in his lab one day wondering if since he had already figured out how to move an object across three dimensions, how hard it would be to move it across four.
And if an invention like that came to be, it would change the world. A lot of our internet technology might not exist, because everyone would be trying to exploit this whole brand-new technology. A whole ecosystem might arise. And it would change the world, at least as much as the internet has.
