And of course there’s the notion that a user who can’t figure out a lunch tab on her own can program a computer to do it for her. Note that she’s expected to do her own programming; no such thing as just buying someone else’s already written program.
mixdenny, my favorite Word Perfect feature that never showed up in Word was “Make It Fit”. It told you how many pages you had, you told it how many you wanted, and it automatically adjusted margins, font size, and line spacing to get it there. It was great for those times when you just have three words on the last page, or whatever. And was obviously never used by college students who were assigned to write a “five-page paper” and ran out of things to say by page 4, because that’d be too easy.
That was a good one, but not nearly as good as “Reveal Codes”. (Nowadays I just use LaTeX, which is like “Reveal Codes” on steroids.)
Well, today I have the cover off mine. Doing fan/noise reduction stuff.
I was not an early adopter, home computer-wise (or other things). Despite being a Computer Science prof. So it wasn’t until 2/1988 that I got my first box. XT-clone with a 20MB HD. The 20MB (30MB if you use RLL) HD was just becoming standard for home use. (A lot of people ran 2 floppy drives.) The first 10MB “Winchester” drives for PCs had been out a few years. But earlier than that the cost restricted them to mainly businesses.
I also perpetually upgraded part by part. (First a 3.5" floppy which required a IO card with a BIOS. A 2400bps modem. Then a 130MB SCSI drive that cost hundreds of dollars!) So I have a Ship of Theseus on my hands as well.
Since I had Internet (well, NSFNet) at work, I could get all sorts of useful stuff.
But 1988 was fairly far along in terms of home computing.
The couple I mentioned in my earlier post would have had a home computer c1983. That’s the era I think of in terms of first useful generation of home computers. The Apple IIe came out then and we had those at work for teaching. (We had workstations in our offices.)
The earliest person I knew with a “home” computer had a PDP-11 rack system in the middle of their apartment living room in 1977. But that sort of doesn’t count.
My first personal computer was with Datapoint 2200 terminals back in 1976 in the Israeli Air force. They were bought as mainframe terminals, but not needed as such, so we repurposed them to be standalone processors for some local processing needed. They had dual 8 and a half floppies, were slow as hell, programmed in a kind of interpretative language called Databus and seemingly had a TTL discrete processor implementing the 8008 instruction set, since Intel was not ready with their chip. It was fun, since I was used with the supercomputers of that time - CDC 6600/7600
Much later, during grad studies, 2 IBM PC’s were dumped on me and my room buddy since no one wanted them. It was in the early 1984 (or 1983, can’t remember). They had a 8088, dual 5 1/2" floppies and 2 options for a OS: UCSD Pascal or CP/M. We were very bored that summer, when our advisor (S from the RSA people) was travelling, so we decided to implement RSA and DES on that, 90% of it being in assembler, with all the smart numerical algorithms we could think of). It went so well that it was the fastest software implementation of that thing on any computer. And basically that was the time we started our crypto company.
After a few months we each got one hard disk as well. They were 5MB units (maybe 10 ?). They had the same case as a PC and connected with a huge card and cable to the processor. Also PC/DOS arrived, and finally that thing behaved a bit like a normal computer.
One additional (very niche) use for computers which we had in the 1980s was for Dungeons & Dragons characters. When I was taking my first computer class, in high school (on a TRS-80), I wrote a program for “rolling up” D&D characters, using random number generation in place of dice.
A year or two later, once I was in college, and had access to a computer with a printer at my work-study job, I was using Lotus 1-2-3 or WordStar to create D&D character sheets, which I would then print out.
oddly enough when I bought a “graveyard” pack bell 486 that was a mix and match of old stuff and new it came with 3 cds of recipies it was a set from better homes and gardens and 2 of crosswords puzzles
missed the edit heres the reprint : oddly enough when I bought a “graveyard” pack bell 486 that was a mix and match of (seriously)old stuff and new it came with 3 cds of recipies it was a set from better homes and gardens and 2 of crosswords puzzles
When I had to call tech support because my brother messed up something on the pc … when I read the hardware list the guy chuckled and said “you bought a Walmart special” it was like 4 meg of ram didn’t have a sound card …was vga , but I had to use a boot disc to run sim city … I paid 40 dollars for an extra 4 meg or ram the odd thing about it ? it had a 14.4 modem but I didn’t know that until after I gave it away because none of the online services had a number for anything over 2400 baud
Pentiums came out in 1993, and I don’t believe any of them had turbo buttons. So I’d say you’re pretty much using “turbo” for legacy apps by then.
Back when I worked at the hospital in the early 00s, their Internet traffic was used almost as much for searching recipe websites as it was to look for medical information.
Next in line was the local police blotter. :o
I think the reason recipe storage was mentioned in ads is it was something people often kept on index cards in a box. Such data is ideal for primitive computers. The first implementation of hypertext emulated an index card collection.
One of the first uses I made of a computer was to inventory my LP (and other media) record collection – both album titles and individual cuts, with composers and artists. An extremely simple database program handled this very well, and I still use it. If I didn’t have a computer, I’d use index cards in a box.
I vividly remember repeating the “recipes and menu planning!” pitch to my father, a physicist, who laughed in contempt. I didn’t even cook then, I was a young teen.
Has anyone, EVER, used a computer for recipes? I bet there are apps now. I mean a laptop or desktop. Something bigger than a tablet.
I do use the internet to find recipes…which I print out, so they can get dirty, and I can easily move them around the kitchen as I move from stove to work space, and I can make handwritten notes as I make changes on the fly.
Then they get stuck into an alphabetized accordion folder. Or more likely, piled on top of it.
This is an important consideration: When you’re right out of school, an easy way to get some experience is to take an old school project and [del]weaponize[/del] productize it. Recipe databases and music databases are school-project-like projects because they map neatly to the domain: Each thing is a record, you have obvious fields, obvious ways to organize them, sorting makes sense (sorting is a big topic in Computer Science and always has been)… It’s practically a textbook project, even if the textbooks haven’t been written yet, and you know that you can get it right even on simple systems with inexperienced programmers and practically no pre-written libraries to use.
It’s really a very clean project, which means you get to use a lot of textbook algorithms and not think too hard about complexities in the data which would make a mess of the algorithms. If you made genealogical software, for example, you have to think about divorces and remarriages and adoptions and the endless abyss of strangeness which is human names.
That said, people make money on genealogical software. People make money selling programs which print bingo cards, too.
I probably still have my movies/actors CD around here somewhere. It could find what other movies an actor appeared in!!! I hope they moved on to other software titles before the Imdb appeared.
Dennis
The system we got after the 2x40mb HDD model (from doing some Wiki searching, it appears to have been an 8086) was a 486 DX4/100; It was around 1995. It had a turbo buttom but we never used it for anything that I can recall. It also had a much, much larger HDD - I want to say 512Mb.
I do. Not because paper recipes would get splattered upon, but simply because they’d get lost.
It’s this. I participate in a woodworking forum. There was a time when a bunch of the guys (and it’s just about all guys) wanted to get these really high quality slow speed grinders for sharpening chisels and plane blades. A lot of them have trouble getting their purchases past the missus. Then the maker of these grinders made a kitchen knife holding jig for the grinder.
Marketing genius. All the guys tried to sell their wives on the grinder purchase by telling them it was perfect for keeping the kitchen knives sharp, and reported back that it worked perfectly.
I personally keep a number of recipes as Google docs on my Google drive so I can pull them up on my phone when I’m in the kitchen. So yes.
I would guess that a lot of recipes were saved on floppies back in the day. And phone contacts and lists of record albums and grocery lists. After all, you just dropped $500 on the thing so now you have to justify that cost if only to yourself. That sort of data entry made you feel like you were accomplishing something high tech.
Now how many recipe files were loaded & opened a week after the fact is a different story.
You too? I think mine’s been since 1996-ish. Periodically I replace some significant chunk of parts, but never the entire thing at a go. Last time, it was motherboard, memory and processor, but I kept the hard drives, case, power supply and video card.
And I haven’t put the cover back on the case either… well, I did for a while, then I got tired of dealing with it and eventually got a water-cooler that doesn’t fit inside.