Mail bag time. Correspondent Mala Bhargava, editor of Computers@Home in New Delhi, India, asks this question:

"Why'd you name your column and website Future Shoes? It reminds me of work at MIT Media Labs. Did it have anything to do with that?"

The answer is a not surprising yes, and no. As a technology reporter, I have long been aware of the famous slogan used by cyber-alchemists Nicholas Negroponte and Sandy Pentland of the "Things That Think Project" at MIT Labs. It goes like this:

That needs some explaining. Shoes have always smelled bad, because of foot odor, and the things shoes step in. Recently, shoe companies have marketed kids' sneakers with blinking lights built in -- every time the shoe feels weight, the red light goes on.

And in the future, this trend goes berserk, as processors and sensors within a shoe perform all sorts of info-tasks -- ascertaining the weather, exchanging virtual business cards with whomever you're shaking hands with, unlocking the door you're walking toward, possibly issuing sell instructions to your broker, who is a microprocessor in an umbrella somewhere.

The point Negroponte and Pentland are making isn't that shoes matter, but that the whole world will be intelligent in the future, including shoes.

But that's not what I'm getting at.

It turns out that I coined the phrase future shoes, not these guys. In 1976 the University of Minnesota hired me to write and produce a public affairs program for public TV. It was supposed to be a dull talking-heads type interview program, but I went a bit berserk, and with the help of coproducer Dick Breitman, created a kind of collage program.

Its format could be described as Laugh-In meets Carl Sagan meets Monty Python meets Jack Handey. Each show was an irreverent, rapid-fire series of mini-interviews, mini-art exhibits, mini-poems, mini-philosophical utterances. The point was that each little moment, each little insight, better equipped you for your inevitable hike into the future. Hence, future shoes.

The world being cruel, and 'Future Shoes' being ahead of its time, the program only lasted a few installments. It probably logged no more than 10,000 viewers in its short, doomed life. It was such a terrific show that the University recorded over the original masters, because it needed the blank tape.

So I could stand here and tell you that that is the origin for the name 'Future Shoes.' But I would still not be telling the whole truth.

The truth takes me way back to 1955, in Olmstead Falls, Ohio. It is one of my earliest memories -- I am five. I remember it is snowing sloppily, and cars outside are padding through the slush. My mother has brought my brother, my sister, and me to a Red Goose shoestore.

My mom only has money for two pairs of shoes, so I am free to wander through the store.

In an aisle separating the adult shoes from the kids' shoes is a strange machine called a fluoroscope. You put your feet under a lens at the bottom, then peer through one of three eyepieces -- one for you, one for the salesman, and one for your mother.

The viewing ports show an actual x-ray of your feet within the new shoes. Wiggle your toes, see the bones squirm.

The purpose was simple enough -- to see if the shoes were too tight. But they emitted huge, sloppy doses of radiation to children's feet. Hundreds of thousands of children were exposed every time they wore out a pair of sneakers, through their entire childhood.

These forward thinking machines, made by the Adrian X-Ray Company of Milwaukee, and designed by Brooks Stevens, who also designed the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile, were in every shoestore in the 1940s and '50s. They made shoe-buying a futuristic experience.

They were powered by radium, thought by medical science earlier in the century to be a miracle cure for many medical ailments. The people who swallowed these potions melted away inside. When they complained to their doctors, the doctors prescribed more.

That captures my sense of future shoes, in all the concept's vitiated glory, better than the "things that think" spiel of MIT's Media Labs.

So Mala, my friend in new Delhi -- the future will indeed be marvelous, as Negroponte, and Pentland, and a thousand other cyberdrumbeaters promise. Computers, and networks, and biochemistry will lift us to another level of knowing and being.

But let us not forget that we are flesh. And that flesh is perishable. And that we do as much harm when we guess, impetuously, as when we set out to be cruel.

My future shoes follow in the footsteps of the past.

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