Who programmed your Thanksgiving dinner?

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"In the winter of 1969, the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog offered to computerize your kitchen.

Cooking up a gourmet holiday meal will be a snap, the department store promised. Push a few buttons, and — presto! — a shiny orange-red, white, and black machine will compute the perfect five-course meal. No more silly culinary errors. The days of your wife slaving away in her Chanel apron will vanish into memory, and all those blinking lights will add to your holiday cheer.

All you needed was space for this 100-pound machine. And about $10,000. And a teletype. And a paper tape reader. And some serious engineering skills."

The Honeywell Kitchen Computer
 
Interesting. I can't imagine who would have bought that thing or how many they would have sold. Seriously owning a car back them put you back just over a grand or two.
 
Imagine you had to sit down, write, and then feed it program instructions each time you wanted a meal, instead of just pushing buttons. Imagine you had to use machine language.
I'd still prefer my gf/wife to actually cook the meal, and keep all that power to myself.
 
Just as a point of interest, the company that I worked for in the summer of 1981 had several rack-mounted Honeywell 316's as spares and testbeds for older communication systems that they had built and were still supporting in the field. I never did anything with them, though (my job for them was to program an embedded 8-bit microprocessor in assembler).
 
I'm here, by myself, depressed; but, that is normal again.

Someone bought me a coffee at Denny's and someone else gave me a free coupon for a meal.
 
Well, for a kitchen computer I would have expected it to do the cooking itself. But apparently this thing only spits out recipes. In that era I would have expected to see something like the robot from "Lost in Space" as the future kitchen appliance.

"Danger, Will Robinson, danger!"
 
Hey, kitchen-robot. I need a recipe that uses peas.

Code: 
--> You asked for recipes containing peas.  Here is the recommended recipe:
-->
--> Pour two pounds of molten chemically-pure silica into container.
--> Add one tablespoon of semiconductor grade germanium.
--> Stir well, keeping molten.
--> Top with peas.
-->
--> Would you like another recipe (Y/N)?
 
A piece of history..."Don't you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down?" the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sarcastically asked Richard Nixon in the now infamous Kitchen Debate of 1959.
 
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