Kitchen Computer
The Honeywell Kitchen Computer or H316 pedestal model of 1969 was a short-lived product offered by Neiman Marcus as one of a continuing series of extravagant gift ideas. It sold for $10,000, weighed over 100 pounds, and was advertised as useful for storing recipes. Reading or entering these recipes would have been very difficult for the average cook, since the user interface required the person to take a two-week course to learn to program the device, using only toggle-switch input and binary light output. It had a built in cutting board and had a few recipes built in. No evidence has been found that any Honeywell Kitchen Computers were ever sold.
The full text of the Neiman-Marcus Advertisement reads:
"If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute."
"Her souffles are supreme, her meal planning a challenge? She's what the Honeywell people had in mind when they devised our Kitchen Computer. She'll learn to program it with a cross-reference to her favorite recipes by N-M's own Helen Corbitt. Then by simply pushing a few buttons obtain a complete menu organized around the entree. And if she pales at reckoning her lunch tabs, she can program it to balance the family checkbook. 84A 10,600.00 complete with two week programming course. 84B Fed with Corbitt data: the original Helen Corbitt cookbook with over 1,000 recipes $100 (.75) 84C Her Potluck, 375 of our famed Zodiac restaurant's best kept secret recipes 3.95 (.75) Corbitt Epicure 84D Her Labaird Apron, one-size, ours alone by Clairdon House, multi-pastel provencial cotton 26.00 (.90) Trophy Room"
Although a fantasy gift, the Kitchen Computer represented the first time a computer was offered as a consumer product.
Read more about this topic: Honeywell 316
Famous quotes containing the words kitchen and/or computer:
“When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as slaves and degraded them as another man’s slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four years of bloody war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”
—Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)