To be fair, old WinZip was never really shareware. Given that it never stopped working, it was more akin to really naggy donationware, with a stern warning instead of the customary sad, human plea. It goes without saying that new trial has a hard time limit, but by now it's been rendered more or less irrelevant by better, free-er alternatives, including Windows' built-in archiving software. WinZip plumbed the depths of human stinginess, and never found the bottom. Thanks for trying!

Anyway, five years is pretty impressive, but I'm willing to bet you guys can do better: who among you, cheapskate Gizmodians, has hobo-hitched the WinZip train the furthest? [Reddit]

UPDATE: Reader Ed G. wins by half a year. Keep sending! If there's a day one, Windows 98-having WinZip trial downloader out there, I want to find him.

Anyway, we call it the T here in Boston, but to anyone else outside the city and state, you can just think of it as the oldest subway system in the U.S., because it is. One of the older stops, at Boylston Street, was built back in 1897 as part of the now abandoned Tremont Street Subway line, during a time when the streets above had become too congested. So they went underground, and history was made.

And with that 100+ year history comes all manner of dark, dank tunnels, dead ends and even strange smells, all of which are detailed to us over three pages over at the Globe this weekend. The Tremont line has long since been abandoned, the last car having run through it some time in 1961.

There's also a quick video featuring some of the more popular stops at Harvard Square, Boylston and South Boston:

All in all, it's got a lazy Sunday read all over it, and this Bostonian (by way of Waltham), loves that the history contained within will have me thinking a bit more the next time I stumble onto the T after a few too many in Boston proper. [The Boston Globe]

The original had the distinction of being the first talking quartz clock, and the newer version appears to retain much of its functionality. However, the update also features LED lighting and speaks the date, weather and temperature data (in Japanese or English) when the top of the pyramid is pressed twice. Unfortunately, the clock is only available in Japan at the moment, but if Seiko does not bring it to the States, it will undoubtedly make its way here through exporters like Japan Trend Shop, Geek Stuff 4 U or Rinkya. [Seiko via Crunchgear]

We haven't ranked our picks, but we have put them in a rough chronological order. Think of it as a guided tour through the various circles of gadget hell—and feel free to have a little guilt when you spot the ones you've owned (or still do). Anything we've missed? Share it in the comments. There have been thousands of gadgets released since 2000, and we're sure there are at least fifty more out there that should never have seen the light of day.

Update: OK, now all you gallery haters can view the embedded all in one long skinny post, if you prefer. Here you go. You're welcome.

As a college student in 2000, I spent many a morning babysitting the daughter of New York Times reporter Penelope Green. When Penelope got a Modo, I was jeeeealous. The egg-sized device spewed information that was fed to it over a pager network by arbiters of urban coolness. Information about local restaurants or shops or events would show up on the screen (although I don't think it was location-based, or even searchable). It was there, take it or leave it. It was like TimeOut magazine, but more exclusive and wireless.

To get into this elite club, you needed to pick up one of these palm-sized devices at tony places like Fred Segal. They cost $99, which was quite a lot in babysitting currency, though there was no monthly or annual fee. Its creators—who hoped to fund the project ultimately with ad revenues—were prescient in encouraging retailers to create fancy cases for the gadgets long before people started to dress their music players like they were chihuahuas.

As one of the youngest non-diaper wearing people in Penelope's life, I made the case that she should really let me take her Modo for a test drive. Alas, the timing didn't work out. But Christmas was coming! What's more, she hinted that I maybe could maybe keep hers after the story came out. (This was in the pre-Jayson Blair days when newspaper reporters were allowed to keep things. See, newspapers were these printed things that...ugh, never mind.)

The company's founder basically bragged to Penelope about how little the Modo could do. "This is not a personal productivity tool," he said. "We'll never make anything like that.'' Low productivity? Clearly this was a college kid's dream machine. What's more, it was a thing of beauty. Penelope's story said that to use it you had "to engage with it in a physical way, stretching the rubber tongue toggle thing into place or sliding it back out again with your thumb." Hot!

iPods at this point were monochromatic, but these babies came in different colors. The article even suggested buying them in multiples and keeping one in the packaging as an investment, a la a Swatch watch or a Beanie Baby.

Just weeks after the article came out, Modo went belly up. Needless to say, my Christmas sucked. [Vintage Modo stories: Forbes; NY Times; Models.com; Useit.com]

Anna Jane Grossman will be with us for the next few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of ObsoleteTheBook.com, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

At least that's what I understand from this commercial. Truth be told, my attention span is no longer very good, so I'm not sure if my comprehension is really all that. This commercial goes on and on. Forever. It's like a minute. Couldn't they have said all that with a more Tweet-able word count? I don't have the time for this. My time is valuable and I have important stuff to... I wonder whatever happened to Vanessa from The Cosby Show.

Anna Jane Grossman will be with us for the next few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of ObsoleteTheBook.com, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

Saddled as I was with my beeper, I did what I could to avoid actually picking up the phone. For Christmas my mom gave me a few rolls of quarters: a reminder that when she paged me, I was supposed to call her back. Most of my paging, however, was sending numerical messages to my friend Sarah.

My pager was green! Hers was pink! We were so very cool. This number-to-word conversion we became addicted to will probably go down as only a very minor footnote in turn-of-this-century communication, but, for kids who'd never known from text messaging and hardly used email, the idea that I could send her any kind of message and she'd get it instantly—that was pretty darn huge.

Some of our codes were super private so I can't share them, but others were standard: 411 for information, 911 for emergency, 143 to symbolized the number of letters in each word of the phrase "I love you."

There was also an accepted system of sending numbers so that, when written together, looked vaguely like letters. We'd grown up getting adults to spell "BOOBLESS" on calculators by typing in the elements of a story about Dolly Parton and then holding the calculator upside down. (Her bra size was 69 and that was 2, 2, 2 big. So, she took 51 diet pills and went to see Dr. X eight times. Now she's... 55378008.) From there, it was an easy jump to many other words. Hello was 07734. That was one of the easiest one. We said "Hello" a lot. Bitch? Why that was 81764, naturally. There were so many, it became necessary to have beeper-code dictionaries, or at least, a basic decoder.

Now, Sarah and I text using actual words written using actual letters. Boring.

Anna Jane Grossman will be with us for the next few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of ObsoleteTheBook.com, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

Last time I used a mouse pad was when I was when I couldn't find my dog's frisbee. But if I had this little wonder, I'd create a little shrine to it and would bow down to its excellence. No doggy teeth marks on this one please! The MySmart, which was made by Keytronic and aimed at novice Web users, was a $20 device with buttons and input ports a go go.

This decade has seen a shift on the button issue: lots of tactile things to press used to signify that something was high tech. Now, anything with lots of buttons just looks like it is trying hard to not look like an iPhone. This thing's buttons could bring you straight to CompUSA! Online, that is. It could also store passwords and bookmarks. On the site was the explanation:

We believe that the Internet experience shouldn't be confusing. So we developed a simple and secure way to access, surf and shop the Internet.

See, I agree. But the Internet is confusing. To use the vocabulary of 2000, it's a network of a billion million interconnected tunnels to computers. A super highway, if you will. I think that if it weren't confusing, I'd be confused.

The MySmart didn't last, even though its site promised that the first 100,000 would be given away for free (shipping not included). [Archived site from 2000]

Anna Jane Grossman will be with us for the next few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of iamobsolete.net, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

Sometimes the journeys we take through this life begin and end in the most unexpected ways. My encounter with Welles in the last days of his life centered on a common interest: Sony's new one-piece camcorder, the Betacam. It had just come to market and Welles, always the genius filmmaker, had big ideas for what he could do with one. With Welles there were no limits. "You can't do that" wasn't in his vocabulary. This was a short, but very passionate story.

At the time I was running Television Matrix, a small video production facility in the Sunset-Gower Studios in Hollywood. I had been in California only a short time, having moved from Miami the previous summer. I had started in video production in 1975 and had been shooting mostly news for the networks throughout Latin America. Business was good because the networks were switching from film to tape in this period and they were short of video crews. In late 1982, I purchased something totally new—one of the first Sony Betacams delivered in the United States.

Beta Goes To Hollywood

One of our clients in Miami had been Entertainment Tonight. During a lull in a location shoot with Robin Leach, then an ET correspondent, I'd shown him the new Betacam. Leach had been offered a chance to do his own television show, but could find no one in the mid-1980s who could bring in a one-hour episode for his very low budget of $100,000. The Betacam, Leach thought, might be the answer.

"Could this work?" he asked me at the time. "Maybe," I responded. Only the Sony Betacam camcorder—the first one-piece camera and recorder ever made—and a standalone player existed. To edit, one would need to connect the player to another format to finish the work. That would mean integration with a one-inch Type C format system.

Leach made me an offer. If I could figure out how to make all the technology work, he would move me and my crews to LA to do the production on his new reality show. That motivated me to call Charles Felder, then the president of the tiny Sony Broadcast office in New York. My timing couldn't have been better. It turns out that Sony had the same thoughts about how to extend the Betacam and I had brought them the right project at the right moment. In a flash, we made a deal. In exchange for a small financial investment on my part, Sony would build an experimental facility in LA. They would make it a "first" that they'd advertise and show to others in Hollywood.

The Hottest Video Editing Suite in Town

The prospects were exciting for everyone. An elated Robin Leach began to plan for the new show, and I, along with several freelance crew members that I had worked with, moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 1984. One of the reasons we picked the Sunset-Gower lot (the old Columbia Pictures Studios) was it housed the broadcast center for the 1984 Olympics in LA that summer. When the Olympics ended, the networks would have a huge fire sale of their used broadcast equipment on the same lot. I had targeted the pieces we needed in advance, bought the gear, and moved it to our new edit bay days after the games ended.

We were lucky enough to hire Jim Fancher, now chief science officer at Technicolor in Hollywood, to build the facility. He was far more than a brilliant engineer. As a hands-on "can do" guy, he was also a natural-born negotiator who could coordinate the different technical approaches of companies whose gear would not work together. I will always picture Jim lying on his back under a rack of gear talking with tech support at some company about why their product wouldn't work.

Somehow, thanks to Jim, it all came together on time and on budget. By fall, we were ready. The show, now called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, went on the air. To be honest, I thought it was dumb idea that would last for one season if we were lucky. All I really cared about was that we had moved to Los Angeles and that Leach had paid for everything. I was ready for whatever came next. I can honestly say it was one of the great shocks of my life when the show became a major hit. I was totally unready for it.

We had built the first interformat edit bay in the nation (Betacam to one-inch), and Lifestyles was the first major magazine show to be shot using the new format. We had made history. The cost of television production had come down—way down. At least by half. Word spread fast and we were running facility tours in no time. Sony even hired Milton Berle to do a two-page ad for the facility and the technology concept behind it.

Enter Orson

A freelance editor for our show, Paul Hunt, also did some sound work for the legendary actor/director/producer/genius Orson Welles. He told Welles about our Betacam facility, now running almost around the clock, and from that moment on the great man's insatiable curiosity about every new sound and imaging technology took over. Welles wanted to meet me, and thus came a lunch invitation many film buffs would have died for.

To be honest, I knew very little about Welles. I had majored in television and radio at the University of South Carolina in the 1960s and it was hard to escape the many contributions Welles made to the broadcast and film industries. From audio special effects to remarkable moving dolly shots, Welles was a genius of the first order. But outside of having seen Citizen Kane, I didn't know the details of his career nor did I pretend to.

Our first lunch at Welles' favorite haunt, Ma Maison, was a roaring success. For reasons I still don't fully understand, we hit it off. Welles was curious about all things video, especially the Betacam, a device he envisioned to be an Arriflex camera that didn't need film. As our first meeting continued, Welles' small dog, who was seated at the table next to me, kept nipping at my leg. It was annoying, but I didn't dare take a swat at Orson Welles' beloved dog!

That lunch led to many others throughout 1985. In the earlier days of our relationship, he tested me in strange ways. One night, after midnight, Orson (he insisted that everyone call him Orson) called to ask for help in solving a sound problem he claimed to be having. He was recording and editing some narration on his Nagra tape recorder in his bedroom in the hills above Hollywood Blvd.

"Frank, after I do a splice with a razor blade, I get a bump in the sound when I play back the tape. What should I do?" he asked. This was a very strange question from the man who had practically invented modern sound recording. He had scared the nation with War of the Worlds and was asking me such a basic question about audio editing. Though half asleep, I knew he had to know the answer and instantly recognized it as some sort of test.

"Orson, your razor blade is magnetized. Get another one," I answered. "Oh, OK," he responded, apologizing for waking me and then promptly said goodbye. I went back to sleep and never heard of the issue again.

"Call Sony. Make It Work!"

As he learned more about video camcorders and nonlinear editing, Orson became determined to do a video project of his own. We visited New England Digital for a demo of nonlinear sound editing on the Synclavier. As for video, Orson wasn't content with just renting a Montage, one of the first non-linear video editors. He wanted his own, and he wanted it to sit next to his flatbed film editor at home.

As the talk turned to money (it always did in Orson's case), I offered to contribute video facilities and help him raise money for a one-man show to be called Orson Welles Solo. The production would be a retrospective of Orson's favorite theatrical material along with a big dose of magic—both new tricks and archival footage from Orson's glory days as a working magician. Our facility was already booked around the clock, but it didn't stop me from promising Orson anything he wanted.

Through a long and convoluted series of events (and with the help of the late Paul Rothchild, producer of The Doors, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Janis Joplin), the money was raised and the production was set to begin. Now Orson focused on how he'd use the two Betacams we'd secured to shoot the show.

Just as he had accepted no conventional technical limitations when he made Citizen Kane in 1940, Orson approached video in the same unrelenting way. In 1985, Betacams had Saticon tubes—not CCD sensors—and their ability to sync to one another via time code was, to put it mildly, a bit crude. Orson didn't care. He demanded that the handheld Betacams float around the set wirelessly and always be in perfect sync. He also directed that we shoot directly into bright lights and he didn't want to hear about any problems with lag.

"Call Sony and tell them to make it work," Orson demanded, slamming his fist on a table at one point. "Don't ever tell me 'No.'" I called Sony, and Sony responded by sending two expert engineers to help Orson push the video envelope on the project.

The day before the shoot was to begin in November, 1985, the Betacams were tweaked to the max. The jury-rigs—and there were a lot of them—were tested and re-tested. Every engineer and crew member that was to be in Orson's field of view was told that the words "you can't do that" were to be stricken from their vocabulary. With this project, I demanded, we will find a way to do any and everything Orson wants to do. All the old excuses about the limits of video will be left at the front door.

On the Evening Before the Big Shoot

As technical preparations for the shoot continued, Orson taped an appearance in the late afternoon on Merv Griffin's syndicated talk show. Normally, Orson disdained conversations about his past. He'd always say he wanted to talk about the future, not "go down memory lane." But, uncharacteristically, he did go down memory lane that afternoon with his old friend, Merv. Orson charmed the audience, both with stories and card tricks.

After the show, Orson had dinner at Ma Maison and then headed home to finish writing the script for our first taping, now only hours away. Our first day of shooting was to be in auditorium on the UCLA campus. Orson would call when he was ready for us to go to the location.

The next morning, as I awaited those instructions from Orson in my office, the phone rang. It was Paul Rothchild.

"Did you hear the news," he asked gently.

"What news?" I replied.

"Orson Welles is dead."

Orson had died of a heart attack during the night. He was found slumped over his typewriter, working on our script. Minutes later, a Welles assistant called and said bluntly: "Frank, the project has been canceled."

Welles' Legacy and Love of New Technology

I drove home—numb and unable to function. After the initial days of despair, my incredible year working with Orson Welles took on a new dimension. A new journey would begin. Those same Betacams were used to record Orson's memorial service a few weeks later and that event, in turn, introduced me to the remarkable men and women who had been associated with Welles from his days with the Mercury Theater. The film critic Leonard Maltin and I did a documentary with these fascinating people, and I later produced, with Mercury Theater actor Richard Wilson, a retrospective of Orson's best radio work from his personal tape collection.

A couple of weeks after Orson's death, his cinematographer, the late Gary Graver, came by my office for a visit. Gary said something I will never forget.

"I've been driving around for two weeks with Orson's ashes in the truck of my car," he said, matter of factly.

"What?" I responded, quickly envisioning a fender bender with the Hollywood legend's ashes being scattered across an LA freeway.

"I'm not going to take them into my house," Graver said, almost fearing the prospect. "What should I do?"

I thought for a minute, looked a Graver, and said, "I don't know." Some months later, Welles' ashes were buried in Ronda, Spain, on the property of a longtime friend, retired bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez.

The demise of our video project left me yearning to do some kind of major Welles project to fill the void. As I reviewed our time together, I recalled an extraordinary story that Welles had taken nearly two hours to tell me on a leisurely Saturday afternoon a few months earlier. It was about the events surrounding his production of Marc Blitzstein's musical, The Cradle Will Rock, in 1937. It was, Welles told me, the only time in U.S. history that the military was sent out to shut down a Broadway play. He wanted to make a movie about it, but had failed to raise the money.

That was it. I would try to get the film made. It took the support of many of Welles' original Mercury colleagues—including the late actor/producer John Houseman—and a lot of crazy investors to keep the project alive over the years. Most importantly, it took Tim Robbins, who recognized the power of the story early on and spent most of 1990s writing and directing the film that eventually came to the screen.

Houseman once said that it's rare in this life to be touched by real genius. Welles, said Houseman, was the real thing—perhaps the only real genius he'd ever known. Now, I understand what he meant. Welles, long before most filmmakers, saw the powerful potential of small format video. Yet, he was perhaps 20 years too early to enjoy the real fruits of the video revolution in his own work.

Whenever I see a tiny new camcorder introduced, or see Apple upgrade a revolutionary application like iMovie, I think of Orson. Oh, how excited he'd be. The pure magic of it all! If he were alive today, he'd be making his movies without regard to raising huge amounts of money. That, for both Orson and his audience, would be an achievement that we'll never be able to enjoy.

Frank Beacham is a New York City-based independent writer at www.beachamjournal.com. Beacham was executive producer of the 1999 Touchstone Films release of Tim Robbins film, Cradle Will Rock. He and George Demas have written Maverick, a new play based on the events described in this story.

Top CC image from Scary Cow/Flickr; shot of Orson with camera from MovieMail, which sells the brilliant latter-day Welles documentary F for Fake.

There was the immobile singing Poo-chi by Tiger Electronics, a company that also made the i-Cybie, which could lift its leg and roll over. The $99 Fisher-Price Rocket the Wonder Dog, which was operated via infrared headset, could burp and scratch itself. There was also Tekno by Manley Toy Quest, Big Scratch and Lil' Scratch by Trendmasters, Puppy Magic by Toy Biz and more.

Many people who had both real dogs and fake dogs decided to see what would happen when the two worlds collided.

If I had a fake dog... you know, the idea seems so preposterous to me that I can't even go there. My real dog is looking at me as I sit here on my shiny computer which is flanked by my shiny iPod and phone. "Aren't you glad I don't require electricity to operate?" he is saying with his eyes. "Don't you want to take me to the park and escape the backlit cyber world you are immersed in so many hours a day?" Why yes, Amos, I do. Now stop dragging your butt.

If these cyber versions were meant to appeal to real wannabe dog owners, I think they should've made them look a little more doglike. Would it have been so hard to slap some fake fur on these things? I'm thinking they could've gone with some Muppet fur—shaggy blue, maybe. Or Elmo red. Who wants a pet that looks like Robocop. Also: my real dog earns his keep by licking clean the dinner plates and jumping in the laps of cute guys at the park. The cyber curs had no such uses. If I'm going to shell out that kind of money for a non-breathing pet, I'd at least like if it could second as a vacuum.

Nevertheless, many robotic dog owners thought it'd be very original and clever and hilarious to introduce their real pet to their fake pet, as evidenced by the following videos...

German Shepherd doesn't let Aibo touch its meat

Sparky gets in some hot two-on-one action with a Doberman and a Chihuahua

Dog asks the Poo-Chi why it isn't wearing any clothes

A cat watches an impertinent iCybie take a pee

This particular school of cinema reached its nadir with robo-dog snuff films

Anna Jane Grossman will be with us for the next few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of ObsoleteTheBook.com, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

The damn thing got like two over-the-air stations. All I can say is that it is a great time to be alive with our HDTVs and smartphones. Hit the following link to see the full list. [OObject]

In 2000, Budweiser brought us the inimitable—or perhaps slightly imitable—"Wassup" commercial. Okay, maybe very imitable—Grandmas, Superfriends, Teletubbies, you name it, everyone got into the action.

I always get a little misty when I think of the manners and mores of men who lived in times of yore. The way they used cordless phones and had their friends pick up the princess-phone "extension" lines in the kitchen; the way they clacked away at their clunky desktops while staring at CRT screens. Shit, I mean, they actually had spoken-word conversations with each other! Girls were girls and men were not tied to wireless devices. Those were the days.

Anna Jane Grossman will be with us for the next few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of ObsoleteTheBook.com, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

• Creative's $500 Nomad Jukebox (pictured above), was not only "sleek"—at least when compared to a CD Walkman—but "can hold as much music as 150 CDs."

• The Extiva was a $350 DVD player from Samsung with the Nuon chip, so "you can also play videogames." Not sure which videogames we were referring to there.

• Our pick for digital camera was Nikon's twisty CoolPix 990, 3 million pixels for 1 thousand dollars.

• Gateway laptop with 12.1-in. display, 550MHz chip and a year of free AOL was "a great deal" at $1300.

• Two-way pagers from Motorola, $180 each, let you send messages back and forth, and came in "four hot colors."

• LG's Touchpoint 3000 smartish phone cost $400, combined an address book and an organizer, and had one killer app: "Tap someone's name, and it dials for you."

• The $300 Iomega HipZip took little PocketZip magnetic disks instead of flash memory so it was easier to "get with the MP3 revolution"—hooray for obscure proprietary formats that died within a year!

• Cybiko was invented a decade ago but promised to do almost more than what the Peek does today—with wireless messaging and an MP3 "attachment."

• "It's near impossible to find this killer game console—and just as hard to find good titles to play on it." The console? PlayStation 2.

• Handspring Visor Prism, the great hope of the PDA world, had a cartridge slot so that you could "turn it into a cellphone, an MP3 player, or a miniature digital camera." Only trouble was when the cartridges started costing more than the $450 PDA.

The whole list is pretty hilarious—I encourage you to pop over and read more. [Time.com]

I apologize for the crappy quality of some of the images—I had to go grab promo shots found out on the web. For some reason, Time didn't preserve our gorgeous photoshoot online. Guess they thought the internet was just a fad.

Cities Under Domes

The architect and all-around visionary R. Buckminster Fuller believed that one day, cities in cold-weather regions cold be encased under temperature-controlled geodesic domes. Although it might sound loopy, Fuller argued back in the '60s that such a dome over New York City would pay for itself in 10 years, as there would be no more need for snow removal. In addition to temperature control, the domes were also supposed to contain germ filters that would have prevented us from getting sick too.

The Food Pill and the Algae Sandwich

In the 1950s and '60s, when experts thought that conventional food production could not possibly keep up with baby production, some believed we would have to resort to factory-made capsules replete with all our daily nutrients; work on a true food pill, as opposed to a vitamin supplement, began about 100 years ago. Or, we might have to chow down on the most basic foodstuff of all: algae and plankton. One scientist believed we might all have algae tanks on our rooftops today. Another thought we could send out robotic "whales" to harvest kelp from the seas.

The Flying Car

For futurists, this one's an oldie but a goodie. By 1909, forecasters believed that soon, someone would combine, like peanut butter and jelly, the newfangled airplane to the equally cutting-edge automobile. For a century the flying car has been one of those perennially just-around-the-corner innovations, and while work continues on a viable prototype, don't expect to see your Honda become airborne anytime soon. Although NASA has done some work on creating a "sky highway," an electronic corridor in the sky to be used by pilots of small craft, the effort is still at a very preliminary stage.

The Knowledge Pill

Scientists at the University of Michigan in the early 1960s trained worms to avoid an electric shock, then noticed that other, untrained worms suddenly possessed this skill too after eating their learned cousins. It was thought that acquired skills were kept in RNA, a chemical similar to DNA that performs the genetic functions in cells. This led some to speculate that knowledge is stored in our bodies in edible form and to conclude that one day, learning Spanish would be as easy as popping a caplet or dos.

Nuclear Bombs for Demolition and Excavation

In the 1950s, when nuclear weapons were still novel, there was a movement to find so-called "peaceable uses for the atom"—including using atomic bombs as excavation equipment for titanic construction projects. The effort was known as "Project Plowshare" (as in what swords get beaten into) and was intended to show the world that America, then as now the preeminent nuclear power, was not hell-bent on global destruction.

Man-Made Oceans

In the late 1960s there were plans to damn up the Amazon River and carve out some reservoirs (possibly using nukes such as the ones described above) to create an inland ocean that would have covered a huge chunk of South America. The project reached a fairly advanced planning stage before it was abandoned by the leaders of the nations that would have been affected. Among the many problems with this plan: a French engineer calculated that placing so much additional water near the Equator could actually slow the earth's rotation.

Undersea Colonies

By the 1960s, engineers had figured out how to economically harvest the oil and other mineral wealth of the deep seas. Some thought that this would inevitably lead to the creation of underwater Gold Rush towns, communities that would at first house miners and, eventually, their families. A proposed, corollary innovation was the creation of artificial gills that would have enabled residents of these aquatic metropolises to breathe underwater without bulky gear. In 1964, at the second World's Fair held in New York City, General Motors sponsored an exhibit depicting these undersea homes which, of course, had "sea cars" parked in their underwater driveways.

The Self-Driving Car

By now we were all supposed to be able to take our hands off the wheel and let our cars do the driving. At the 1939 World's Fair in New York, one exhibit depicted future expressways filled with autos controlled by radio from a central tower. Sixty years later, near San Diego, engineers built a demonstration "smart roadway" that used sensors and computers to keep the traffic flowing. With the advent of GPS, advanced collision-avoidance technology and cars that can even parallel park without human assistance, this is one innovation we might actually be seeing pretty soon.

The Videophone

A combination telephone-television, engineers had been working on this one since the late 1920s, and actually built prototypes in New York City and Washington. But for a very long time costs were prohibitive: even after they figured out how to make it work, Bell Telephone offered the service 35 years ago for a hefty $90 a month (this was in mid-70s money, remember). Another problem: Bell's own market research, dating from the late 1950s, revealed that people don't always want to be seen as they chat on the phone.

The Safe Cigarette

When the US Surgeon General officially declared, in the early 1960s, that cigarettes cause cancer, tobacco companies responded by trying to come up with a truly safe smoke. Company scientists tried a variety of methods, including attempting to identify and filter out the harmful chemicals and even experimenting with smokable lettuce, but the effort proved a bust, and was finally abandoned following the successful cigarette company lawsuits of the 1990s.

Veteran newspaper reporter Paul Milo is now a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo News, Beliefnet and Editor and Publisher. You can grab a copy of his enjoyable book Your Flying Car Awaits for around $10 at Amazon or find it anywhere else that books are sold.

Fortunately, this novelty watch has not been completely lost to the ages. If you look hard enough, you can still get your hands on dirt cheap "modern" versions. [RetroThing via Gearfuse]

That's the DVD player, modded to look like it's spinning one of the original LPs.

More DVD player, now with more lights!

And more lights...

And the internals. Inside is a Core 2 Quad CPU and a RAM cooler to counter overheating. [Case Mod Blog via Technabob]

Strictly speaking, this should be called typewriter art, since the ASCII acronym didn't come into use until 1963, and this piece, but a young gentleman named Bob, apparently, wasn't created until the mid-thirties. And unlike the thousands of lovingly pecked-out Simpsons characters and ironic meme conversions you're used to seeing in rendered in type, "The Dream Ship" sails with purpose. It's part of an apology, to a fair young maiden!:

Dearest Hazel,
I wanted to apologize for the way I treated you yesterday. I really am ashamed of myself. I don't know what is the matter with me but I guess I just don't know how to treat a lady.

There's a carefully lineated ship up there that begs to differ, Bob. Full letter at [SquareAmerica via BoingBoing]