6 High-Tech Inventions You Never Realized Are Stupidly Old

550 Years Before "The Cloud," We Had Multics

Back in the 1960s, "the cloud" was simply referred to as a "compatible time-sharing system," which allowed users to borrow the same gargantuan machine. Back then, computers like an IBM 7090 cost around $3.5 million, and took up a room the size of a basketball court. So MIT-based Multics came up with a solution: a single mainframe servicing businessmen, Wall Street types, and super competitive yacht-racing handicappers alike. Truly, it was the domain of gentlemen.

43D Movies Were Released (And Ignored) In The Silent Era

Depending on who you ask, 3D films are either migraine-inducing nightmares or the future of filmmaking. Well, at least one of those opinions is wrong. They're the past, around since movies didn't have sound. 3D tech is remarkably unchanged since then, the only real difference being the switch from film to digital. The same twin-camera recording system and double projector setup used in Avatar was refined by Harry K. Fairall and Robert F. Felde for the 1922 motion picture The Power Of Love. It was the technological blockbuster of its time, albeit with fewer blue eight-foot-tall cat people.

3The First Computer Dating Service Was Started In The '50s

If you've been relying on the algorithms of OkCupid, eHarmony, and Match.com to find your soulmate, we regret to inform you that people have been trying to find the perfect dating formula for about as long as we've had computers. The first versions of the idea can be traced back to a 1959 Stanford project involving a five-ton computer and punch cards. This is the first and only time punch cards have ever got someone laid.

Harvard students, quick to notice its profitability, were the first ones to monetize loneliness -- an idea quickly adapted by Indiana University students and dubbed "Project Flame." The concept was especially popular on campuses, debuting a few years before sexual liberation was a big thing. Questionnaires were fed into a computer, which crunched the data and paired off people based on compatibility criteria.

2Downloadable Games Are Older Than You Are

Mattel's 1979 Intellivision console was significant, if only for one reason: It was designed for people unable or unwilling to go to a store to buy game cartridges. You could order and pay for it on the phone without even getting off your love-beaded beanbag chair, marking the beginning of a glorious tradition of gaming addicts stealing their moms' credit card info.

1Nazi Scientists Successfully Built An Early Version Of Skype

Before 1936, video phones were the stuff of sci-fi fever dreams, and what few experiments did toy with the idea all ended in abysmal failure. That year, however, Germany unveiled a working model in time to show off to the rest of the world during the 1936 Olympics, itself a gigantic vanity project to demonstrate the staying power of the "thousand-year" Reich.

Fernsehsprechstellen, literally translated as "TV stations," offered folks the chance to talk to someone face-to-face via a TV screen, as long as they were connected to another video-phone system in the German Reichspost network. It was then completely ignored, as the Nazis diverted their technological attention to, um ... other projects. The only proof it existed was found buried in an obscure museum. For once, Stanley Kubrick was actually behind the times.