So many computer ads (both print and on TV) mention how in addition to doing your taxes, balancing your checkpoint, and playing electronic games that you could also store recipes on them. In fact, those four things were really the only things early personal computer ads mentioned as bullet points for owning the systems and this persisted well into the mid-90’s.
I get the first three, but was recipe storage really that important or even practical in those days? Obviously you can say it was done for rather sexist reasons as they were trying to find the one thing they thought could bring women to use PC’s but the fact this was happening all the way in 1998 from what I’ve seen makes me think there has to be something more to it.
I think the sexist reasons were definitely a part of it. But also the fact that, more than just about anything else, paper recipes tend to get dirty, smudged and stained, often rendering them unusable. Who wouldn’t want a nice clean recipe that never gets dirty?
I have stored a lot of recipes on my computer. I think they were just trying to let people know that it didn’t have to be a business reason. You could use them for homey stuff, too.
The answer to this is interesting and counter-intuitive. Even the early developers of PC’s could not even begin to imagine what they would evolve into. They aren’t designed to do a particular thing and that is a hard sell. Instead, they could do just about anything (within their hardware limits) but such nebulous concepts aren’t really something you can put into a box and push from a retail standpoint. Keep in mind that early PC’s and Macs were really expensive (often thousands in 1980’s dollars and much more in today’s dollars for something that was basically just an overpriced calculator and experimental device) so that had to come up with some justification for people to want one.
Games were one selling point. They were primitive by today’s standards but some were extremely well designed and still classics today. Word processing was another use although the early ones were fairly hard to use and dot matrix printers weren’t very good. Still, they beat typewriters any day for common tasks and editing. The idea of spreadsheets was foreign most people but caught on fairly quickly as well.
One thing that early personal computers could do was store vast amount of information (up to 640kb!). It seems ridiculous now but there was literally no concept of why an individual or household would need to keep track of that that much data. There were no digital videos, MP3’s or anything like that. A single floppy disk could hold entire novels in text form and most people do not write novels.
Marketers had to come up with some justification that people could relate to. Recipes! Almost everyone has some of those and they help explain how rudimentary databases work at the same time. Of course, almost no one used their personal computers to store recipes once they figured out how they worked but that is beside the point.
It has gone full-circle now though. The web has made every conceivable recipe imaginable available to anyone now. Many of them were hush-hush secrets not that long ago.
Keep in mind: The Honeywell 316 sold for $10,000 in 1969 ($77,804 in 2016 dollars) and, well, I’ll let the ad copy speak for itself:
It required a two-week course to learn how to use the thing, because, apparently, adding a CRT and a light pen or something would have pushed the cost out to something even more risible than ten grand.
H-316 variants were used as the routers (technically, Interface Message Processor) in the early ARPANET, from the late 1960s up until 1989, and the H-316 was used for the first standalone Forth implementation, so they were far from toy computers. However, having one in your home in 1969 is akin to buying a city bus to make your trips to and from town.
Yeah, I was going to mention word processing, too. Now, it seems like an obvious selling point, but at that time, maybe people just didn’t really have a clear idea of what it was.
Recipes, on the other hand, were probably the closest thing most households had which were effectively do-it-yourself, constantly growing libraries, often made up of index cards or paper and susceptible to disorganization that people wanted to somehow make easy to use.
‘Tis said that these early developers were fond of the lil’ brown microdot … and storing recipes is something the lil’ brown microdot allows one to think … VisiCalc changed everything (that’s the original spreadsheet) … a basic financial forecast took months to prepare … what an Apple II running Visicalc could do in minutes … now every accountant needs a computer just to keep up …
More so than you might think. I have downloaded a good many recipes over the years, from dozens of forgotten sources, but I print them out for use in the kitchen as I don’t want buttery fingerprints on the screen. These dirty, smudged and stained printouts sit in a folder on a shelf in the kitchen. I keep promising myself that I will laminate them one day.
Well, Steve Jobs famously said that the computer was a bicycle for the mind, and Hofmann did take his first famous LSD trip while riding a bicycle, so maybe there is something to it.
(To go Furthur on a tangent, there are three Hofmanns at the heart of the Sixties: Albert Hofmann, who accidentally invented LSD, Abbie Hoffman, who helped bring the LSD culture into the political realm, and Judge Julius Hoffman, who presided over Abbie’s trial and was therefore a part of the system which effectively strangled the Problem Child in the cradle. Makes one Leary of doing research on some things, it does.)
My Dad was a relatively early adopter of PCs and often got the “You can store recipes!” thing on it from people encouraging him to get one in the early 1990s.
He wanted one for word processing and educational use; the idea he’d want to keep recipes on it was laughable - after all, there were heaps of cookbooks in the kitchen full of recipes. He frequently expressed puzzlement that of all the awesome things a PC could do, “storing recipes” was the one people kept highlighting despite no-one actually doing that.
We had a computer in our house in the early 1990s and it had not one but two 20Mb hard drives - which was enough to store almost literally every single IBM PC Compatible software programme in existence at the time with plenty of space left over. He got it through his work and for some reason whoever was in charge of organising computers for people just ticked the “Give us the most storage space possible” box and ended up with the 1990s equivalent of a Petabyte harddrive.
Today, of course, Dad loves all the awesome stuff computers can do and the wonders of the internet - and as far as I know he’s never used a computer to store recipes on, or look them up online.
I dunno; storing recipes seems like a pretty great application to me. I was using my computer for this back in the 1980s. There were a number of advantages:
[ul]
[li]No need to buy a bulky, expensive recipe book if it has only a few recipes you want; just borrow it and enter the desired recipes into your computer.[/li][li]No need to take said bulky, expensive recipe book with you into the kitchen to cook. You can print off the one recipe you want and not worry about getting it dirty.[/li][li]Similarly, you can easily share recipes with your friends via diskette (if they have a compatible computer) or by printing it on paper. No need to laboriously copy out the recipe by hand; no need to haul the book to the library or drug store to photocopy it.[/li][li]If you want to change a recipe, it’s much easier to edit the recipe file than to make cramped annotations in the margins of a book (which in any case would lower its resale value).[/li][li]If you really do prefer recipe books, you can easily print off and bind a book of your own favourite recipes.[/li][/ul]
There was a Dilbert strip from the mid-90s mocking the “marketers go straight to recipes” trope. So the concept was known and mocked even at that early date.
So many “computer things” have become so commonplace that we forget how “nerdy” even things like word processing and video games were back then. Marketers were just grasping at straws from something “relatable”.
Early computers were mostly pieces of crap, with little use other than allow nerds to play around with just to see what they could get it to do. There was very little practical use for the large, clunky, expensive, extremely slow electricity guzzlers for the average person that couldn’t be done better by something else (pocket calculator, pencil and paper, etc.) but companies of course wanted to sell their computers to as many people as possible, so they had to grasp at straws trying to make up some list of excuses to try to get more people to buy them.
When I was in High School during the 80s, we had a new subject on the curriculum called Computer Studies. We learned some BASIC programming and how to operate an Apple IIe, and a lot about the internals of a typical computer. RAM and ROM and CPU and “microchips”.
And it was clear to me that the teachers didn’t know all that much about computers, less than many of us nerdy kids. But even more than that, it was clear that nobody really knew how computers would be used in the future. Apart from games, which were very visible, and the vague idea of computer graphics like CAD, or the giant calculation and data entry devices that popular culture painted them as being, with punch cards and ticker tape, they were largely anathema to most people.
Keeping data like “recipes” was the best idea that most people could come up with for a home PC that was useful to every member of the family. Dad and son would play games, daughter would draw pictures with Turtle Logo, and Mom would keep a catalogue of recipes.
I personally convinced my Mum to get us a ZX Spectrum by spinning bullshit about keeping track of accounts. She never actually touched it, and I just played games on it.
20 years later she finally did start to use a PC, and now she’s quite fluent, doing all sorts of creative stuff (age 74), so it was probably not a bad idea to start from a familiar relatable idea like recipe cataloguing.
May I offer a wild-ass guess? Early computers did not have much space and were not very fast, and recipes represent a high information-to-usefulness ratio: just a tiny bit of text can be very useful. Much harder to upload and edit and save a novel or journal than a quick recipe which is only around a page. Later advertisements kept the “recipe” copy out of force of habit.
You’ve either got your timeline or your HD size wrong. The first WinTel box I bought (in college, for around $1,400) in 1992 had a 170 MB HD, and that was a medium-sized drive on one of the cheapest 486es I could find, and I soon had to resort to using Stacker/Doublespace for extra space before being able to buy a new, larger HD to add to the system. 40 MB was already not large by the early 1990s.
I think it was naive, sexist PR stuff. The PC makers thought that the target demo was men but wanted to give the guys a justification for getting the okay from their wives for such an expensive and seemingly pointless purchase.
The people selling the computers were Mad Men types who couldn’t imagine women buying a PC to use for the same reasons as men. And what do women do? Cook. Ergo recipes!
Consider one of the first couples I knew who bought an early home computer. She was a Computer Science prof. I seriously doubt she used it for recipes.
My recollection is I was finishing primary school so it would have been very late 1980s or early 1990s. The system only had EGA graphics and I remember fiddling about with things like EMS and XMS trying to get it to run games like Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain.
I should mention I was in NZ at the time and the country wasn’t on the cutting edge, technologically speaking. For a few years in the mid-1990s I was one of the few kids at high school to have the internet at home.
