When reporters visit North Korea, they’re usually given a highly restricted itinerary, consisting largely of visits with happy workers, tours of gleaming-but-empty buildings, and lectures about the glory of the Great and Dear Leaders. And, based on this Times report , the latest batch of reporters—who accompanied the New York Philharmonic on its historic visit to the Hermit Kingdom—had to follow the same script. But there was at least one striking lapse on the part of the group’s handlers, during a visit to the country’s National Library:

A librarian said the library had room for 30 million volumes and was 95 percent full. Two-thirds were said to be foreign-language books. The librarian summoned up some books on a conveyor belt and spread them out for the visitors to see. They were mostly computer books: “Electronic Packaging, Microelectronics and Interconnection Dictionary,” and a Windows 95 guide.

Yes, that’s right. Windows 95! If this is what they’re showing off to the press, who knows what’s actually in the rest of those 30 million volumes? Manuals for repairing your ‘46 Packard? The latest on that wacky new disco dancing craze? Suddenly, I’m a lot less worried about the North Korean nuclear program.

Back when I was at Engadget, we did a mega-post called Engadget 1985, in which we imagined what the site would have been like had it been created 20 years earlier. We filled it with ASCII art, a BBS-style UI, and our picks among hot products like th NTT Shoulder Phone, Windows 1.0, and Apple’s Lisa. Sure, it was a little precious, but it was great fun tracing today’s hot products back to their roots and casting knowing glances forward in the process (my fave among my own writeups: “We still think this Macintosh thing is an overrated, underpowered poor stepchild to the Lisa, and that Jobs and Sculley will eventually come to their senses and scrap it. At least they’ve stuck with the Apple II line-without the Lisa, it looks like that’s the only real hope for the future of this company.”)

New York magazine has just done its version of this exercise, with the ambitious Strategist 1968 package (best appreciated on dead trees, a popular medium back then). The package, which simulates the magazine’s actual layout of 40 years ago, includes a Best Bets section, a Look Book fashion spread, a restaurant review, and more. It’s a great effort, though at times it seems like the editors tried a litle too hard to squeeze the best of the 60s into 15 pages that could never have existed in the real Febriuary 1968 (nightlife picks include both Hendrix and Warhol; the dude in the fashion spread complains that his old man doesn’t get his hair). Still, the winking time-warped references are a kick (Times Square’s “eternal seediness seems destined to outlive us all”), and the Best Bets layout is a gorgeous collection featuring everything from a shiny red Royal typewriter (manual, natch) to a totally sleek Garrard 301 turntable ($500 in 1968!). Of course, the layout also takes liberties with the space-time continuum ( Douglas Engelbart’s big show-and-tell with his mouse took place in December 1968; mass-market Ouija boards were popular as far back as the turn of the 20th century) and has a couple of examples that are just way off base (would anyone have commented that a Zippo serves as a way to “remember we’re still in Vietnam” during the Tet Offensive?). Still, Strategiest 68 is, for the most part, a kick; a fun, silly, precious reminder of a New York that barely exists today, and even in 1968, didn’t truly exist except in the pages of glossy magazines.