Half a million dollars. That’s what a complete system for reading this high-density optical disc could set you back, and each disc held 40,000 pages of information. The pitch? Think of the money you’d save on paper. Printing everything on a metre-high stack of these discs would take a strip of paper 6,000 kilometres long. Today the same 40,000 pages fit on a USB stick that costs less than lunch. — Welcome to the official Beyond 2000 channel, where you’ll find weird inventions, retro technology and the future the way we imagined it back in the ’80s and ’90s: flying machines, robot jockeys, a car that folds into a suitcase, virtual reality in 1987, the smart homes of the ’80s and wearable gadgets that actually existed. Some of these came true, some never took off, and some are still waiting. Here you’ll find compilations of weird and unnecessary inventions, full episodes of Beyond 2000 and Before 2000, and clips of our favourite inventions from the archive. New videos every week. Subscribe for more of the future we imagined.