Reliving the days when the possibilities were endless and we weren't already captured by an entrenched computing path is important. 50 years ago, every marketer intuited that a home computer would be used for storing recipes. It never happened. Why not? (Reasons aren't hard to come up with, but the process of doing so draws our imagination toward what computer interfaces could have been and should still be.)
> "[...] every marketer intuited that a home computer would be used for storing recipes. It never happened."
Storing recipes "never happened"? Rubbish! Even famous cook Casey Ryback used his Apple Newton to store recipes, as evidenced in the 1995 documentary Under Siege 2 [1].
Yeah easy to say that but that is because they are the elite. They have a newton, do you? I don't! Time for Newton 2, I mean they are doing iPod sock 2 so why not Newton 2.
I would love to see a new Newton with the same spirit of innovation but current tech. Current phones are so boring. No innovation, just slow evolution.
It really was way ahead of its time. I remember the handwriting recognition being excellent for the time, too. Meanwhile Palm forced its users to write each letter one at a time in a tiny box and requiring specific sequencing of each stroke too.
Newton had a modem module you could plug in and third parties had written web browsers for it, it basically was the first smart phone just without the phone.
Trying to imagine that level of innovation, but starting from present day tech, is very interesting.
I had the message pad 100 and a message pad 120. My handwriting improved, and it s recognition also improved. It was brilliant. I stored shopping lists and recipes on it. Although a lot of fun was made of the handwriting recognition, it was surprisingly good, and got better with use.
Hey, I store recipes on my home computer! Having a portable handheld terminal that can view the recipes makes it much more practical than it would have been in the 80s.
I keep my bread recipes in Google Keep on my phone. It's extremely useful, since the phone takes up much less room on the counter than the laptop does.
It didn't? Who knows how many copies of Americas_test_kitchen.pdf are floating around out there, how many recipes are in Apple notes or in Google Keep. Sure, you might just Google for "banana bread recipe" and get lost on a tangent about technology, and the smartphone isn't the personal computer of yore, but recipes existing in a digital format has happened.
I think in the context of the GP's comment, 'never' means it never (or hardly ever) happened on the products it was expected to happen on (home computers, as understood circa late 70s/early 80s). Yes, it has happened on very different devices decades later.
Spot on. The home computer never became accessible from the kitchen, and the storage system most anyone uses for recipes, if not paper, is the web or some other internet-accessible source. (Don't know for sure but I'd bet photos of recipes found online, viewed on a phone, is the most common.)
RE ".... a home computer would be used for storing recipes...."
No doubt, some home computers where used for this purpose, However, (QUICKLY) much more interesting applications where discovered, for example games and educational applications, business applications, engineering applications including spreadsheets ... Look at old software catalogs of software around 1980 (say) .. to verify this range of available applications or CD application archive CDs .....
Some are Word documents that I view on my phone. (Via OneDrive).
My turkey recipe is a PDF that I print out two copies of when I prepare the turkey. My hands get messy (and unsanitary) when I follow it, so I don't want to handle my phone.
(In case you're curious: When I called up a BBS for the first time as a teenager, I didn't realize that I had to make up a name for myself. My GWBasic manual was sitting in front of me, so I just called myself GWBasic and really liked the name. At the time, GWBasic was very obsolete, so most people didn't get the reference.)
This article really resonates with me. Sometimes I stop and think that in actuality people do very little computing with their devices. If people actually used computers to manage their life, a windows 95 dekstop would already be plenty powerful to run all the necessary software.
As always, entertainment and ads are what keeps the treadmill going
I often think this way about my smartphone: what do I need the “smart” for? Maps, messenger, banking app, taking/viewing photos, web browser, listening to audio (music, podcasts, audiobooks), taxi app, calendar/reminders. Seems so little… How old of a hardware could support my needs?
Whenever I see this fact, I don't doubt it, but it reminds me of how weird and out of touch I am. The Camera is probably one of my least used phone feature. My lens got a crack across it a few years ago and I have no idea how long I went before even noticing it. It's never even occurred to me to care about how "good" my phone's cameras are. For those rare times I need to take a picture of something, my 8 year old phone camera is good enough. I really don't feel I need more pixels.
It's always so strange to learn how important that feature is to normal people.
I think this is where the consumer should be demanding more. We went to the moon and back with 64kb memory computers. Why are these basically sci-fi devices in our pockets that can communicate between each other dumb terminals for a bit of JSON and tracking.
"Apps" should be using the array of sensors to be more than displays of simple information AOL could have done if they had really good marketing
Stone thrown for a hit. Apps want to use locations and the microphone, but not to help you, but to sell you stuff. I have 14 sensors on my phone, mostly for positioning, and the software still cannot reformat text for zooming without a left to right cornrow panning. You get the absolute absurdity of it.
AOL had great marketing, just not pointed at consumers, it pointed it at ad providers. The free disk thing ...
Everything on that list could be done 30 years ago with an internet connection, except maybe online maps. Do not confuse functionalities with how much modern GUIs weigh things down
By "back in the day" I was thinking more IBM PC era, rather than Windows 95 era. I agree that there's almost no qualitative difference between how personal computing was done 30 years ago and now.
In the 60s, my dad told me that the greatest coming inventions would be:
1. a TV you could hang on the wall like a picture
2. a typewriter that would enable correcting what you wrote
He was right!
(I remember when my dad was writing a book, my mom spent endless hours retyping the revised manuscripts. It seemed like a hellish task to me. I'm glad that job is gone.)
Classic tech is still a source of very important lessons, and potentially software and hardware options. Both in regards to focusing on building for the hardware, saving energy and power, but also even in relation to software that had it's time but could be rebuilt for modern hardware and serve a new purpose.
I remember how computer enthusiasts had hard time explaining to “regular” people what personal computers were good for. They would often mention things like cooking recipes and balancing checkbooks which really was not convincing at all…
> The first TRS-80 ad was similarly scattershot, promising to be everything to everyone: “[p]rogram it to handle your personal finances, small business accounting, teaching functions, kitchen computations, innumerable games
Innumerable games sounds very compelling (though the Apple II was more solidly in the video game system business with support for color graphics and game controllers; but Apple's Mac later yielded many nice black-and-white games, aided by the Mac's sharp, though tiny, display.)
Nice article though showing a spreadsheet (two versions of VisiCalc), two word processors (Electric Pencil and WordStar - of George R.R. Martin fame), and not just games (MicroChess) but a rather interesting, if primitive, abstract animation program (Electric Paintbrush).
Digital art/creativity is I think an underappreciated application area for computers, though programs like {Mac,MS,Deluxe}Paint etc. and Photoshop were milestones, and demoscene software formed its own art practice and culture. Processing is perhaps a modern heir to Electric Paintbrush.
We had a Commodore 64 and an Amiga back in the 80s. I used to type up books reports and research papers which was really nice.
Once, I got in trouble and had to go home and write sentences. I used the word processor to copy/paste the sentence 500 times (or whatever it was). The teacher was dubious of this, but not fully understanding personal computers, gave in and accepted it.
This article really sells short the importance of user groups and even more informal networks, as well as type-ins, in providing software, whether deliberately released by the author to the public or not. Upwards of 99% of the software on the personal computers I saw in the early 80s was non-purchased. Computers are awesomely powerful copying machines, and we took advantage of that to the fullest!
A few of the most important software packages, like Microsoft BASIC, VisiCalc, and WordStar were motivated by the opportunity for profit, and those have disproportionate visibility in the historical record because people bought advertisements for them.
Nobody bought ads for the software distributed on the monthly HUG disks, because you didn't have to be convinced to part with your money to get a copy, and the author didn't have any incentive to convince you. If you wanted any software from the "HUG Parts List" you could get it for roughly the cost of copying: https://vtda.org/pubs/REMark/1980/remark-issue12-1980.pdf#pa....
The dominance of not-for-profit software copying never ended, from my point of view. We went from in-person user-group meetups and mail-order disks to BBSes, computer clubs at schools, and colleges, and then to FidoNet, Usenet, and the internet. Shareware was a big deal starting in the mid-80s; it was sort of nominally profit-motivated, but most shareware authors never made any significant money, and kept writing shareware anyway. Exceptions like McAfee Antivirus were exceptional. See https://bbs.retropc.se/smmvirus/00index.html for some kind of idea about the environment McAfee came from in the BBS era.
Reliving the days when the possibilities were endless and we weren't already captured by an entrenched computing path is important. 50 years ago, every marketer intuited that a home computer would be used for storing recipes. It never happened. Why not? (Reasons aren't hard to come up with, but the process of doing so draws our imagination toward what computer interfaces could have been and should still be.)
> "[...] every marketer intuited that a home computer would be used for storing recipes. It never happened."
Storing recipes "never happened"? Rubbish! Even famous cook Casey Ryback used his Apple Newton to store recipes, as evidenced in the 1995 documentary Under Siege 2 [1].
1. [https://starringthecomputer.com/feature.html?f=23]
Yeah easy to say that but that is because they are the elite. They have a newton, do you? I don't! Time for Newton 2, I mean they are doing iPod sock 2 so why not Newton 2.
I still have my Newton but I wasn't, nor am I, elite.
I didn't store recipes on it, though.
I would love to see a new Newton with the same spirit of innovation but current tech. Current phones are so boring. No innovation, just slow evolution.
It really was way ahead of its time. I remember the handwriting recognition being excellent for the time, too. Meanwhile Palm forced its users to write each letter one at a time in a tiny box and requiring specific sequencing of each stroke too.
Newton had a modem module you could plug in and third parties had written web browsers for it, it basically was the first smart phone just without the phone.
Trying to imagine that level of innovation, but starting from present day tech, is very interesting.
I had the message pad 100 and a message pad 120. My handwriting improved, and it s recognition also improved. It was brilliant. I stored shopping lists and recipes on it. Although a lot of fun was made of the handwriting recognition, it was surprisingly good, and got better with use.
We thought about selling a recipe program for the Mac. The tag line was going to be "The only time you want a mouse in your kitchen."
Hey, I store recipes on my home computer! Having a portable handheld terminal that can view the recipes makes it much more practical than it would have been in the 80s.
What recipe storing app do you use?
I use AnyList for recipes, grocery/shopping lists and checklists. It’s a great app!
vim
Once you have been doing computing for long enough, the best solution is a very well formatted text file.
When on Windows I organise my entire work flow in Notepad.
I keep my bread recipes in Google Keep on my phone. It's extremely useful, since the phone takes up much less room on the counter than the laptop does.
Obsidian
It didn't? Who knows how many copies of Americas_test_kitchen.pdf are floating around out there, how many recipes are in Apple notes or in Google Keep. Sure, you might just Google for "banana bread recipe" and get lost on a tangent about technology, and the smartphone isn't the personal computer of yore, but recipes existing in a digital format has happened.
I think in the context of the GP's comment, 'never' means it never (or hardly ever) happened on the products it was expected to happen on (home computers, as understood circa late 70s/early 80s). Yes, it has happened on very different devices decades later.
Spot on. The home computer never became accessible from the kitchen, and the storage system most anyone uses for recipes, if not paper, is the web or some other internet-accessible source. (Don't know for sure but I'd bet photos of recipes found online, viewed on a phone, is the most common.)
My spouse does. Google docs provides an editable, sharable, easy to use way to do recipes.
RE ".... a home computer would be used for storing recipes...."
No doubt, some home computers where used for this purpose, However, (QUICKLY) much more interesting applications where discovered, for example games and educational applications, business applications, engineering applications including spreadsheets ... Look at old software catalogs of software around 1980 (say) .. to verify this range of available applications or CD application archive CDs .....
Example Apple II catalog from cira 1980 from archive.org https://ia903201.us.archive.org/12/items/Programma_Catalog_S...
Interesting that by far the majority of the programs in this catalog happen to be games.
What are you talking about? I store recipes in my computer, and routinely look them up on Google.
The spirit of GWBasic lives! How do you view them when you're cooking? Do you print them from your home computer or do you use a mobile screen?
Some are Word documents that I view on my phone. (Via OneDrive).
My turkey recipe is a PDF that I print out two copies of when I prepare the turkey. My hands get messy (and unsanitary) when I follow it, so I don't want to handle my phone.
(In case you're curious: When I called up a BBS for the first time as a teenager, I didn't realize that I had to make up a name for myself. My GWBasic manual was sitting in front of me, so I just called myself GWBasic and really liked the name. At the time, GWBasic was very obsolete, so most people didn't get the reference.)
This article really resonates with me. Sometimes I stop and think that in actuality people do very little computing with their devices. If people actually used computers to manage their life, a windows 95 dekstop would already be plenty powerful to run all the necessary software.
As always, entertainment and ads are what keeps the treadmill going
I often think this way about my smartphone: what do I need the “smart” for? Maps, messenger, banking app, taking/viewing photos, web browser, listening to audio (music, podcasts, audiobooks), taxi app, calendar/reminders. Seems so little… How old of a hardware could support my needs?
> taking/viewing photos
Camera and screen quality are often what the new generation of a phone is sold on.
For everything else, yeah if you're not watching videos or gaming then you probably don't need a top-end model.
> Camera
Whenever I see this fact, I don't doubt it, but it reminds me of how weird and out of touch I am. The Camera is probably one of my least used phone feature. My lens got a crack across it a few years ago and I have no idea how long I went before even noticing it. It's never even occurred to me to care about how "good" my phone's cameras are. For those rare times I need to take a picture of something, my 8 year old phone camera is good enough. I really don't feel I need more pixels.
It's always so strange to learn how important that feature is to normal people.
I think this is where the consumer should be demanding more. We went to the moon and back with 64kb memory computers. Why are these basically sci-fi devices in our pockets that can communicate between each other dumb terminals for a bit of JSON and tracking.
"Apps" should be using the array of sensors to be more than displays of simple information AOL could have done if they had really good marketing
Stone thrown for a hit. Apps want to use locations and the microphone, but not to help you, but to sell you stuff. I have 14 sensors on my phone, mostly for positioning, and the software still cannot reformat text for zooming without a left to right cornrow panning. You get the absolute absurdity of it.
AOL had great marketing, just not pointed at consumers, it pointed it at ad providers. The free disk thing ...
[dead]
> Maps, messenger, banking app, taking/viewing photos, web browser, listening to audio (music, podcasts, audiobooks), taxi app, calendar/reminders
That's not really "little". Back in the day computers could only do a fraction of this. Today you have it all in your pocket
Everything on that list could be done 30 years ago with an internet connection, except maybe online maps. Do not confuse functionalities with how much modern GUIs weigh things down
By "back in the day" I was thinking more IBM PC era, rather than Windows 95 era. I agree that there's almost no qualitative difference between how personal computing was done 30 years ago and now.
In the 60s, my dad told me that the greatest coming inventions would be:
1. a TV you could hang on the wall like a picture
2. a typewriter that would enable correcting what you wrote
He was right!
(I remember when my dad was writing a book, my mom spent endless hours retyping the revised manuscripts. It seemed like a hellish task to me. I'm glad that job is gone.)
Classic tech is still a source of very important lessons, and potentially software and hardware options. Both in regards to focusing on building for the hardware, saving energy and power, but also even in relation to software that had it's time but could be rebuilt for modern hardware and serve a new purpose.
I remember how computer enthusiasts had hard time explaining to “regular” people what personal computers were good for. They would often mention things like cooking recipes and balancing checkbooks which really was not convincing at all…
> The first TRS-80 ad was similarly scattershot, promising to be everything to everyone: “[p]rogram it to handle your personal finances, small business accounting, teaching functions, kitchen computations, innumerable games
Innumerable games sounds very compelling (though the Apple II was more solidly in the video game system business with support for color graphics and game controllers; but Apple's Mac later yielded many nice black-and-white games, aided by the Mac's sharp, though tiny, display.)
Nice article though showing a spreadsheet (two versions of VisiCalc), two word processors (Electric Pencil and WordStar - of George R.R. Martin fame), and not just games (MicroChess) but a rather interesting, if primitive, abstract animation program (Electric Paintbrush).
Digital art/creativity is I think an underappreciated application area for computers, though programs like {Mac,MS,Deluxe}Paint etc. and Photoshop were milestones, and demoscene software formed its own art practice and culture. Processing is perhaps a modern heir to Electric Paintbrush.
We had a Commodore 64 and an Amiga back in the 80s. I used to type up books reports and research papers which was really nice.
Once, I got in trouble and had to go home and write sentences. I used the word processor to copy/paste the sentence 500 times (or whatever it was). The teacher was dubious of this, but not fully understanding personal computers, gave in and accepted it.
Win! Win! Win! ...
That Apple II font is so crisp. Just learned it came from the Signetics 2513 character generator chip (1970):
https://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Signeti...
This article really sells short the importance of user groups and even more informal networks, as well as type-ins, in providing software, whether deliberately released by the author to the public or not. Upwards of 99% of the software on the personal computers I saw in the early 80s was non-purchased. Computers are awesomely powerful copying machines, and we took advantage of that to the fullest!
A few of the most important software packages, like Microsoft BASIC, VisiCalc, and WordStar were motivated by the opportunity for profit, and those have disproportionate visibility in the historical record because people bought advertisements for them.
Nobody bought ads for the software distributed on the monthly HUG disks, because you didn't have to be convinced to part with your money to get a copy, and the author didn't have any incentive to convince you. If you wanted any software from the "HUG Parts List" you could get it for roughly the cost of copying: https://vtda.org/pubs/REMark/1980/remark-issue12-1980.pdf#pa....
The dominance of not-for-profit software copying never ended, from my point of view. We went from in-person user-group meetups and mail-order disks to BBSes, computer clubs at schools, and colleges, and then to FidoNet, Usenet, and the internet. Shareware was a big deal starting in the mid-80s; it was sort of nominally profit-motivated, but most shareware authors never made any significant money, and kept writing shareware anyway. Exceptions like McAfee Antivirus were exceptional. See https://bbs.retropc.se/smmvirus/00index.html for some kind of idea about the environment McAfee came from in the BBS era.
"Appliance Computer" is such a cool name
"You don't upgrade your toaster, do you?" -Steve Jobs (supposedly, infamously opposing any kind of upgrades, slots, etc. for the Mac)
see also: https://www.folklore.org/Diagnostic_Port.html
> Steve immediately nixed his proposal, stating that there was no way that the Mac would even have a single slot...
> He would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party
The more things change...