A working kitchen needs just a few things to function: an oven, a stove, a fridge, and, of course, an automatic hot dog cooker.

Hot Diggity Dogger

Cooking hot dogs in the microwave: It takes about a minute for the wiener and 10 seconds for the bun. That’s just so complicated. Fortunately, there’s the Hot Diggity Dogger, a specially-designed toaster with hot dog-shaped holes and bun-shaped holes that cook each correctly, and they all pop up together at the same time.

Microwave Bank

If the refrigerator has historically been a home’s brain center — it’s where notes are left and the kids’ drawings are displayed — hardware company NCR thought that the microwave could be the home’s brain center of the future. In 1998, it unveiled the Microwave Bank. Not only did it cook popcorn and Lean Cuisines, but its window had an Internet-enabled screen that allowed users to conduct virtual banking transactions.

The Towel-Matic

There are a lot of stand-up paper towel dispensers on the market. This is the only one that electronically tears off a paper towel for you when it senses your presence.

Polara

It was a clever idea if a complicated one. This was a combination oven and refrigerator made by Whirlpool. Say you wanted to have a chicken for dinner. You could put a cold, raw one in it in the morning and leave for work and the Polara’s refrigeration coils would keep it cold all day. And then about an hour before you got home, the cold coils would turn off and the heating unit would turn on to cook the chicken to be ready at the pre-programmed time.

Keurig Kold

Keurig virtually created and then dominated the single-cup coffeemaker market with its “pods” of dry coffee that when placed into a machine and infused with hot water resulted in a single cup of hot coffee (or tea, or cocoa) in about a minute. In 2015, it attempted to move into the cold beverage device market with the Keurig Kold. Designed to compete with the SodaStream, the popular $80 appliance that allowed customers to infuse gas into tap water and then add syrups to make soda, the Keurig did the same…at a cost of $370. The machine was pulled from the market after nine months, but Keurig plans to re-use the technology for an at-home instant beer maker.