Take my advice, the ideal temporal hideout is 1979. No sensible time traveler would ever stop there.

1979 was a pretty miserable year, you can take it from me. There was disco and bad hairstyles and Three Mile Island and the hostage crisis and the Plymouth Horizon and a TV show called Supertrain and gas lines and double-digit inflation.

But the home computer industry was, if not burgeoning, at least interesting.

Home computers were just on the verge of being economically viable in those days, and many flash-in-the-pan companies made a bid for market dominance.

The list of companies that crashed and burned immediately is long. Osborne. Sinclair. Altair. Cromemco. Ohio Scientific. Texas Instruments. Quasar. Others – like Kaypro and Tandy and Commodore – hung in for a few years longer, twisting and turning to find a market niche, but eventually disappeared. Only a few –IBM and Apple and Compaq – stayed in it for the long haul.

As the big three American automakers, unwilling to change, plod miserably toward extinction, little upstart automakers are trying to be the first to bring green auto tech to the American consumer.

And what we’re seeing is a repeat of the computer industry of the 70s. Lots of little underfinanced companies bringing half-baked products to market. .

Let’s call Phoenix Motorworks exhibit A. The L.A.-based company had an innovative idea: don’t build the whole car from scratch. Rather, buy the “glider” – that is, the vehicle sans engine and drive train – from a Korean manufacturer, then add an all-electric engine and battery pack. Voila! Instant electric car.

Phoenix created two models: a midsized SUV and midsize pickup. They claimed that the vehicles had an effective range of 250 miles and could completely charge within a few hours. What’s not to like?

The Phoenix vehicles went on sale last fall as fleet-only trucks. But last month, the company declared bankruptcy:

Details are still very sketchy, but it appears that Phoenix Motorcars filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday, April 27th. Not surprisingly, the global economic downturn is cited as one of the main reasons for the filing, but another major contributing factor was a recent $5.3 million arbitration apparently won by former drivetrain supplier UQM.

Kids, here's a life lesson from your Uncle Mike: when your drivetrain supplier is suing you, things are bad.

I will admit that I was on the waiting list to purchase one of the plug-in pickups. But alas! It was not meant to be. Goodnight, sweet Phoenix Motorcars, and may a flight of angels sing thee to thy rest.

But perhaps one of the other new electric upstarts will hang in there and get their vehicles to a showroom near you -- or at the very least, force one of the big automakers to market their own electric alternative.

After all, what do you think spurred IBM to create their own PC?