zlacker

>>redshi+(OP)
I think its interesting to see these ideas just be unable to predict the true scale of miniaturization of personal computing. They still saw the kitchen computer as some kind of appliance or something built-in to the home. Meanwhile most of us do have kitchen computers; a ton of people look to their phones or tablets for many of the tasks these early kitchen computers were planned to do. Keeping track of meals, providing recipes, keeping track of inventories, ordering groceries and meals, etc. is all commonly done with kitchen computers these days.

Its just we don't call them kitchen computers. We call them smartphones and tablets, and they're even more embedded in our lives than many of these 1970s futurists could even imagine.

And yet at the same time we're still nearly as far off from truly completely automating the kitchen. I still don't have a machine that I walk up to and it can make me a wide variety of meals with little to no interaction on my part.

>>vel0ci+Qhd
The flip side of that argument is that the home computers of the 1970s and 1980s (the only computery things that would've been priced comparably to a household appliance) had only tiny amounts of storage available to them (and even that storage was highly impractical for sustained use) - they really were little more than glorified desk calculators. So the widely imagined uses in the kitchen or for other sorts of household management tasks could not realistically pan out before the price of modern computers started to slowly drop down in the mid-1990s. Of course the Internet took over not long after, and we all got used to things like looking up recipes on the Web. So there's that, too.

>>zozbot+6rd
Erm.

I used a word processor on the C64. Spreadsheet software. Paint programs. Vector graphics editors. Ran a BBS, nightly sending email all around the world via Punternet(like fidonet), shared files, ebooks, etc, etc.

While there is more processing power today, outside of a web browser, maybe 70% of the stuff I do on a desktop has not improved with modern computing post 80s.