When I was a kid, I used to enjoy watching TV programs about the future. 
Stuff like Tomorrow's World and Beyond 2000. Basically programs where 
they show you crazy new inventions. Some of them seemed fantastic, some 
of them seemed utterly stupid. There aren't that many that I still remember.

I do recall some guy demonstrating a kind of green putty that "sweats" 
when you heat it. He took a handful of this stuff, rubbed his hands in 
it, picked up a thin bit of copper pipe, and proceeded to blowtorch it. 

completely unharmed due to the unbelievable thermal dissipation 
properties of the putty.

I especially liked the car security system which involves electrifying 
the car seat to several thousand volts. They demonstrated the sparks it 
generates, but nobody actually said anything about what it does to a 
human being. I'm guessing this isn't legal. ;-)

There was a suggestion that one day, your entire house would be 
controlled by a computer. Stuff like, you could put some food in an oven 
that doubles as a refrigerator, and when you leave work, you dial a 
special phone number which tells the oven to stop refrigerating and 
start cooking, and when you get home, your meal is done.

Yeah, well, /that/ never happened. :-P Today of course, it wouldn't be a 
telephone number. It would be some kind of Internet operation. But there 
are a number of security, safety and reliability questions to consider. 
Do you want random strangers to be able to control your oven, or open 
all your windows? Probably not. What happens when the system stops 
working? On top of that, given that they've yet to come up with a way 
for the component parts of your stereo system to communicate with each 
other unless they're all from the same manufacturer, the chances of your 
entire *house* cooperating are pretty non-existent. ;-)

Another week, they had a plastic key with a microprocessor inside it. 
When you stick it in the lock, it transmits a code to the computer in 
the lock, which makes the door unlock. [Actually, it didn't. The key 
snapped off in the lock, leaving the presenter to tell us all how 
wonderful it is, and how this is only a prototype.] It seemed pretty 
stupid to me, but today electronic locks are all over the place. They 
just don't make them shaped like mechanical keys any more - because 
that's silly.

Unfortunately, towards the end of the show, every invention they 
featured was "hey, somebody took [random household object] and put a 
small computer inside it, allowing it to do [list of largely useless 
functions]". I guess that's why they eventually cancelled it; they just 
couldn't find genuinely interesting inventions any more.

I do remember them demonstrating the Sony MiniDisk, which *did* 
eventually become a commercial product. It was supposed to kill the old 
magnetic cassettes. At the time, recordable CDs hadn't been invented. So 
while you could *buy* pressed CDs, if you wanted to *record* anything, 
the _only_ available option was cassette. The presenter explained how 
loud sounds mask out quiet sounds, and MiniDisk uses this effect to 
squeeze more data than would usually be possible onto such a small carrier.

(Today of course we know that MiniDisk belongs with Zip and Jazz in the 
category of "kind of successful, but not very". Zip disks were supposed 
to kill the 3.5" floppy. LS-120 was supposed to kill it. Jazz was 
supposed to kill it. CD-R nearly killed it. But in the end, flash drives 
are what actually finished the humble floppy. Similarly, cassette was 
killed not so much by MiniDisk but by a combination of CD-R and 
ubiquitous MP3 players, not to mention the Internet.)

I remember seeing the first automatic speed cameras, and thinking this 
was a neat idea. Oh how wrong I was... ;-)

I also remember something rather puzzling. Apparently somebody 
discovered that if you etch silicon with a certain kind of acid, it 
produces a special microscopic structure which has an unexpected 
property: it can transform electricity into like, and the reverse. This 
was hailed as the future of IC technology. In the future, we were told, 
interconnects on an IC would work using light rather electricity. For 
light has one really critical advantage: beams of light can pass through 
each other.

By contrast, if you want to move signals around using wires, you either 
have to have extremely long and convoluted wire routes to get around all 
the obstacles in your way, or complex multiple-layer wiring designs. But 
with light, a signal can just go straight from A to B, intersecting as 
many other signal paths as you like.

So if this technology is the future... where is it? How come it's 
completely vanished off the face of existence?

There seemed to be some suggesting that the entire IC might work by 
processing light instead of electricity. I'm sceptical about whether 
that could work. I'm not aware of any light-based switching technology.

On the other hand, just using light for implementing long-range 
connections? That could *totally* work! By strategically using optical 
signals in place of electronic ones, you might be able to drastically 
reduce signal path lengths, which reduces propagation delays. More to 
the point, if I'm understanding this right, long traces have the problem 
of high capacitance too, which an optical signal path would seemingly 
also avoid.

So why is absolutely nobody using this stuff? I can only imagine that 
the answer is the same as for the 3D IC. In other words, "it's too 
expensive" combined with "we haven't reached the hard limits of current 
methods yet".

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