In addition to the accordion file of yellowed newspaper clippings and food-stained 3x5 cards I never look at tucked into the bookshelf full of aging cookbooks I rarely look at I have a cloud-synced OneNote notebook with all the recipes I actually use.
I occasionally print one off using my main PC. Which has been a laptop for about 7 years now, but was a desktop before that.
More often nowadays I look at them on my Surface. which sits on a nearby counter while I cook. With the keyboard attached and all it’s sorta a laptop even though technically it’s a tablet.
So yes, I do keep recipes on computers. But in fairness I only started that in 2015 or so.
I also do timelines for elaborate feasts in Excel. One column for milestone, one column for desired end time, one for duration, and a computation for required start time. Fill it out, sort by start time, print it and you have a complete TPFP checklist. That’s a Time Phased Feast Plan.
Something simple like Thanksgiving I can just wing it, but once in awhile when you have several elaborate things coming together, some of which need a few hours prep it helps to lay it out carefully.
What do you mean, “by then”? The original point of the turbo button was to support legacy apps; they had always been used for that purpose. Once the turbo button disappeared, legacy apps no longer worked correctly (since they ran way too fast to be usable) so people turned to software solutions such as Mo’Slo, or (for particularly tricky cases) directly patching the binary.
I wrote a recipe card database once in college as a database class project, but I can’t say I ever actually used it.
Most people I know ended up just scanning their old printed/written recipes and keeping images of them named appropriately (“Mama’s chocolate cake”, etc…) instead of transcribing them into some sort of database or into text files, for whatever that’s worth. So if you ask for the recipe, they tend to email you a jpeg of the actual scanned document.
But yeah, early on there weren’t that many home productivity uses for PCs, so the manufacturers and software companies tried to flog the few they could come up with, which mostly revolved around word processing type uses and for rudimentary database type uses.
Until the advent of the Internet and the corresponding growth of sites like banks, online shopping, bill payment, etc… along with apps like browsers, there were just the rudimentary home uses and games. And really… if your internet connection was to take an extended nap, what uses would you have for your PC/tablet/etc…? Those same rudimentary home uses and games, along with things like digital photograph/video editors/manipulators. Without internet access, we’re not too far removed from 1981 in that regard.
You’re making a gross oversimplification (assuming by “Internet” you mean “World Wide Web”). Online banking, shopping, bill payment, and stock trading were all available in the 1980s (and maybe earlier, for all I know) through dial-up services offered directly by individual financial service providers and retailers, or through mass-market online service providers like CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, and Delphi. Of course, the scale and diversity of offerings were not anything like what we see today, but it’s not fair to claim that the services simply didn’t exist or were somehow out of reach of the average user. In fact, they were widely promoted in home computing magazines of the time.
True. But there was also a period of 3-5 years when PCs were common but modems were not. That era was the one where standalone uses for PCs had to be contrived by marketing departments to move PCs out of the realm of electronic hobbyist microcomputers and into the realm of commonplace household gadget.
I can recall that in about 1985, before buying my own first PC*, a friend had one and I commented that there’s nothing it can do that an ordinary homeowner needs. A small businessperson could certainly have used one for accounting, inventory, etc. But the typical citizen? No way.
This from a guy with a BSCS from 1979 and by then several years working as a dev doing software for mainframes and minicomputers. Including dial-up apps.
IMO with the advent of 2400 baud modems (and the commercial infrastructure to connect to) the home PC began to develop the beginnings of utility for the masses.
No-name PC/XT clone w Hercules graphics card, amber monochrome 12" CRT monitor, 2x 5-1/4 floppies, and a 10(?) MB HD. Later upgraded with a 2MB EEMS card. Woot!!
Reading this thread brought back a lot of memories about how it was “back in the day”. And I was smiling quaintly at the thought of using a computer in the kitchen where it could get all spattered and such.
And then I remembered that I was in a store just this past weekend, and happened to be looking at several displays of tablet stands. The displays were all in the Kitchen Gadgets area.
I think that on some level, the idea of using recipes to push computers and computer-related solutions is still around.
It really took until Mac and Windows for word processing on the PC to take off. What we take for granted now was once magical: WYSIWYG (pronounced wissiwig) - what you see is what you get. If I recall correctly, the Wang word processors of the 1980s were WYSIWYG (and with vertically-oriented monitors with black on white displays). Until PC based word processors had this capability the Wang ruled supreme (get your mind out of the gutter right now). Once PCs had WYSIWYG, Wang was doomed.
I remember I wrote my PhD thesis using Lotus Manuscript, a non-WYSIWYG word processor with pretty advanced formatting capabilities - it could do equations! It had a WYSIWYG-like preview mode so you could tell roughly what things would look like without making a printout (those old dot matrix printers were really slow), and the formatting was (mostly) printer independent so I could proof on a dot matrix (actually bubble jet) printer and use a laser printer for final copy.
WRT recipes, many times I made plans to move all the old family recipes into a database, if only to print out clean copies. I am just realizing that I really enjoy seeing my long-deceased mother’s handwriting on all those index cards she wrote out for me when I left home. Sniff…
@BobArrgh: Not 30 minutes ago my tablet was displaying a recipes.com page while sitting on the butcher’s cart. I was following it right along as I mixed the spices for a leg of lamb.
After just 20 minutes in the oven now it smells marvelous. Shame I can’t post that; I’m sure you’d enjoy it.
Yeah, not the best choice of words. I meant by that point it was less “Hey, I bought a new PC and still need to be able to play the games I played yesterday” and more “Hey, I found an older floppy in the closet with a black-and-white pinball game on it, I guess I probably need a turbo button to be able to play”
My main cookbook is the one Mom compiled of all of everyone’s favorite recipes of Gramma’s, a few years before she died (and which she then gave copies of to everyone in the family). Most of the recipes are typed up, but the first one in each section is left handwritten.
And yes, I mostly use the PDF version of the book, because I’m not even sure where I put the bound book away.
I think you are bit confused. The very first IBM PCs shipped in October of 1981 - with MS-DOS as their default operating system.
I bought one of them in Feb 1982 shortly after they became available. Only $5000 (back when $5000 was Real Money) for a PC with an 8088 processor, 512K of memory, dual 160K floppy drives, and a blindingly fast 80CPS dot matrix printer!
I think you’re misremembering. The first IBM PCs ran PC-DOS, not MS-DOS. (Not that the two were very different; it was mostly an issue of branding.) CP/M-86 was also available as an OS.
Back in the late 70s, when my mom, my sister and I bought the first family computer (TRS-80 from Radio Shack) the salesman actually tried to discourage us (40 year old mom, 2 tween girls) from buying a computer, with the line “That’s very expensive for keeping recipes”. So apparently the meme of women only wanting a computer to file recipes had stuck with him. I did refrain from kicking him in the shin.
It was never that expensive, was it? I remember seeing plenty of ads like this one from 1982 quoting $5/hour or thereabouts. I suppose you’d have to pay long-distance fees if there was no local access number in your area, but you’d be paying that to the phone company, not the online service.
I did a bit of googling, and you are absolutely correct, sir. The core operating system was written by Microsoft, but the product shipped by IBM as “PC-DOS” on their very first PCs included some hardware-specific utilities (the example listed was the MODE utility) written by IBM. It wasn’t until later that the products merged.
The base fee was lower, but there were premium areas that charged dollars per minute. (In 1991, base for Compuserve was $12.50 an hour at 2400 bps, $22.50 an hour at 9600 bps, and a $9.00 per hour surcharge if you used an 800 number, which at top speed and with the surcharge means around $8 to download a megabyte of data.)
That’s still only 52½¢ per minute, even at 9600 bps with the “toll-free” surcharge. Yes, there extra charges for premium services, but I don’t recall online banking and shopping to be among them.
