ETA: Oh, I noticed you were pointing the 2x20MB as not being large. I guess that’s correct, but that felt pretty big to me at the time.
It’s only sexist if you start from the assumption that it’s sexist. They wanted to sell to both businesspeople and to homemakers, regardless of the sex of the people filling those roles. ftg, the woman you mention presumably wasn’t using it for recipes (or at least, not primarily for that), but what about her husband? What did he use it for?
Not every household has someone working in a profession for which computers would be relevant. But every household has someone who cooks. So if you can sell a computer to everyone who cooks, you’ll get one into every household.
Back in the early 1990s, Computer Shopper was my bible. (For those not familiar with it, CS was a monthly magazine where each issue was bigger than a major city’s phone book.) I’d read it practically from cover to cover (including at least skimming most of the ads) and each issue would be worn and dog-eared by the time the next one hit the shelves. In the back there was one company named Dee One Systems and they consistently had the lowest or nearly lowest prices in the magazine, with the prices dropping month by month. These were not fancy ads like for Gateway 2000 or Dell or such, but were mostly taken up by a large table, listing base systems (with a specific type of case, motherboard, and video card) and lists of add-on components, with columns for CPU, RAM, HD and such (I don’t even remember all of the options, but the chart was large and complex.) I would compare the price changes for various components each month and plan out what configuration I would buy when I finally had enough money saved to buy one. So I knew component prices in the early 1990s very well.
When I was ready and able to buy in early 1992, I picked a 486DX-33 (the only faster processors available at the time were the DX/2-66 and the DX-50, it was slightly before the release of the first Pentium), 4 MB of RAM, and a 170 MB HD (the monitor was 14 inches, 1024x768 resolution, the video card capable of showing 256 colors at that resolution.) There were both larger and smaller RAM and HD sizes available in those system configurations. There were definitely 340 MB drives available, there may have been some in the 500 MB range in SCSI. My configuration cost $1100-something at that time with no CD or sound card, which I bought separately for around $300, bringing total system cost to the $1400-$1500 range. Which was actually very cheap for what was a near top of the line computer at the time. (And damn was that computer slow. Click on the MS Word icon and the program would take 30 seconds to be open and ready to use. Video? A novelty, running at 160x120 pixels at 12 to 15 fps.)
You can see some back issues of some computer magazines in Google Books. Here is a May 1992 issue of PC Magazine. You can browse through many ads, but in the very back is an ad for Dell that includes a laptop with 60 MB and desktops with 120 MB and 230 MB. (For much, much more than I spent for my system.)
My first “real” computer (i.e., not an Apple ][e) was in 1995, and had a 500 meg HD. That seemed huge at the time, until the day I discovered that the administrator for the research computers had forgotten to set a quota for my account, and that the data I was working with totaled more than that.
My wife, in fact, has a 3-ring binder of recipes that she’s downloaded and printed out. She puts the printouts in plastic sheet protectors.
I remember helping a teacher with calculating marks - using BASIC on a Commodore Pet about 1984. Type in each students term work and exams as DATA, then fiddle with the weighting for the mark calculations to produce the results. Considering how much hassle this would have been for a dozen classes or 20 to 25 students, with a calculator, it sure helped. I suppose if I had an Apple ][ and VisiCalc (how much did that cost back then??) it would have been easier.
One really big advantage of the IBM PC and similar clones was the ability to fit 25x80 characters on a screen, as opposed to lower densities. 80 characters at 10/inch was a full page wide. So real word processing was not as appealing.
Plus, before the internet and BBS’s there was only one way to get data besides typing it in - get it from a friend on a floppy. (one of the first serious viruses was on floppy boot sectors). Hence BBS’s and usenet type newsgroups exploded in popularity when modems became a regular accessory.
So you have this device, it stores information. You have to type most of the information by hand. What sort of things can you put in there? I learned dBase by putting my list of books in my library into there - name, title, author ISBN - what a pain. Maybe you could index your video-tapes or record collection, if you were anal about such things. Maybe you could… type in that recipe collection of random cards, pages, sheets, etc. You could maybe keep a journal or appointment book online, but then storage was an issue in the days of easily crashed hard drives, unreliable floppies… Was it something you wanted to gamble your business continuity on?
Compared to record lists or book lists - the recipes probably made more sense. The others were indexes, this was actual data. Word processing? Most people were not writing books, most editors wanted typed manuscripts and didn’t yet take data input, and the days of serious print quality output were over a decade away. (Inkjets).
So recipes were a good example of the sort of data you could store at home. Because - what else was there?
I’m going back to the OP. I agree that saying computers could be used for recipes was a desperate try to find something - anything! - that could be used to market computers to women.
Computers were a male area. IBM practically created a priesthood of white-shirted black-tied engineers who tended to arcane needs of mainframes. Hidden Figures, the movie, gives a sense of this if you’ve seen it. Because it’s a 2016 movie, the emphasis is placed on showing women computers, but that wouldn’t have be the public image in the 50s and 60s.
It didn’t get better when the first home computers were introduced. Look at the pictures of the Homebrew Computer Club that Jobs and Wozniak attended or an early Computer Faire and they’re 95%+ male.
Jobs’ mania was to tell people how “friendly” computers were. He meant this unilaterally, but the marketers of all companies understood that a lot of the males who were into computers welcomed the challenge and difficulty of using them in the 80s. But they didn’t want to cut off half the potential market. The kitchen then in marketing terms was female territory in those pre-foodie days. Kitchen = recipes = women = friendly.
Of course it didn’t work. Sure, families that had computers were likely to type up recipes for all the reasons given above. We did. That occupied 0.00204% of computer use. But families didn’t start buying computers until they had far more programs, could be used for homework - a big sales pitch, didn’t require floppies, and were literally more friendly. That took a decade or two.
I couldn’t find a computer ad from 1998 that mentioned recipes. I did find an ad for the Mac line of colorful computer cases, though. And their 1997 Think Different campaign, whose 1997 minute-long tv commercials of people who thought differently included 15 men and three women. (Four if you include Yoko Ono in a shot of John Lennon but the camera quickly pulls in on his face.)
What information processing did average people do before computers? Rolodexes, file cabinets, books and recipes, basically. So that’s what early computer advertisements sold them as, electronic recipe books, rolodexes, file cabinets and typewriters that could also play games.
Yeah, instead of a paper recipe, you can have your computer (that cost as much as a used car) get dirty, smudged and stained, often rendering it unusable!
I’m pretty sure that site is probably looking at the installed base, not what was being sold new at the time.
I got a 286 with 640 mb of RAM and a 40 mb hard drive in 1990, and it was decidedly middle of the road, being a Packard Bell from a big-box store. A “power user” computer at the time was a 386 with maybe a megabyte of memory and a 80-100 mb hard drive.
I got teased through the latter half of college (1993-1996) for having “Forty-itis” by my buddies, because I was really strict about what I kept on my hard drives, and what I purged, as if I only had a 40 megabyte hard drive to store stuff on at the time. So clearly it wasn’t the norm by 1993, if relatively cash-strapped college students were mocking each other about them.
Yes, that’s correct. I guess to me, 80MB and up seemed like a lot at the time, but I didn’t really have friends running state-of-the-art hardware at the time. Heck, I was still on a Commodore 128 at the time. 
Not to mention how huge the sucker was. Look at the ad for it, the fridge door can’t open and I am not sure about the lower oven. A tablet it was not.
Back in the day, I was replacing components so often that I would go for many months at a time not even bothering to put the cover on the computer’s case. In fact, you could argue that I’m still using the computer from 1992 because I’ve never once replaced every single component at the same time.
I remember turbo buttons being pretty common back during that era. When did those finally become obsolete?
Oh yeah. You definitely would have had to redesign the kitchen around it, and I’m not even sure what kind of electrical power it would have required. I mean, other than “lots and lots”.
Around the same time that game programmers figured out that it was a bad idea to count processor cycles (rather than the timer) to implement delays. I don’t think I’ve seen a turbo button on any PC compatible newer than a 486.
As psychonaut said, they became obsolete when programmers finally decided to write time-sensitive code (which, on home computers, is mostly real-time games) using actual timers, as opposed to cycle-counting.
However, the basic idea of selectively ramping CPU speed up and down is, if anything, more common than ever in home systems, because modern CPUs go faster or slower based on actual demand, running faster when a lot of CPU is needed and running more slowly when the CPU is mostly idle, to conserve power. This is apparently accessible via ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), something I’m not completely familiar with. This also makes the system quieter, because fan speed tends to be ramped up and down based on heat, which is directly tied to CPU speed.
Our first PCs at work were original IBM PCs, whatever flavor of 286 that was, in the late 1980s. 5 MB hard drives were as good as it got at the engineer level. Early word processing was really crude. We used Multi-Mate. Only the typed letters showed up, no formatting. If you selected Bold, the words changed to green or whatever. Italics, blue. Any combination of formatting just got one color that meant, “more then one…”.
Anything, indenting, tabs, just showed as colors or inserted codes <tab 1>. The only way to see how it would look when printed was to do a print setup and wait for it to compile, it took awhile. Then go back and fix your orphans, widows and rivers and try again.
The government then switched to Word Perfect, a huge advance. When I retired in 2005, WP was still the preferred processor for writing scientific papers due to its superior number/equation handling. We had to buy our own software, since Word was the official word processor of the Gummint.
There are still thing WP does that Word cannot do. My favorite as an author was “Ctrl F7 F7”, right justify with a dot leader, fantastic for lists, Table of Contents, etc. And if you get stuck trying to figure out why your text won’t wrap properly or whatever, it still had “Show Codes” that put it back in 1987 mode which can be a blessing at times. “Show codes” was absolutely revered by editors stuck trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with a submitted document.
One other early advertised use for a home PC was automobile maintenance, you could keep track of your miles. Ridiculous.
And the recipe bit, I remember one women stating she thought that was great, until she found out you had to*** type them in yourself***, and there were no pictures. Not gonna happen.
No one has mentioned the single quote back then that summed it up, “The personal computer was a terrific solution desperately looking for a problem to solve.”
dennis
8088, not 80286 until later.
Sure, but when was this? Approximate year? 1992? 1996?