zlacker

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+(OP)
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.