When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)

When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)(atlasobscura.com)

50 points by redshirt 4 years ago | 60 comments

vel0city 4 years ago |

I think its interesting to see these ideas just be unable to predict the true scale of miniaturization of personal computing. They still saw the kitchen computer as some kind of appliance or something built-in to the home. Meanwhile most of us do have kitchen computers; a ton of people look to their phones or tablets for many of the tasks these early kitchen computers were planned to do. Keeping track of meals, providing recipes, keeping track of inventories, ordering groceries and meals, etc. is all commonly done with kitchen computers these days.

Its just we don't call them kitchen computers. We call them smartphones and tablets, and they're even more embedded in our lives than many of these 1970s futurists could even imagine.

And yet at the same time we're still nearly as far off from truly completely automating the kitchen. I still don't have a machine that I walk up to and it can make me a wide variety of meals with little to no interaction on my part.

zozbot234 4 years ago | |

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.

b112 4 years ago | | |

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.

zwieback 4 years ago | |

Exactly. I've worked in manufacturing automation long enough to know that the equipment needed to generate the huge variety of food even a mediocre cook can prepare would fill multiple kitchens. Automation equipment that's safe and reliable tends to be very big in relation to the items it operates on.

jandrese 4 years ago | | |

One could imagine something like an industrial robot arm that can swap implements being able to manage a relatively large variety of recipes given some staple ingredients in a limited amount of space, but it would be tremendously complex to build and cost more than an industrial robot arm. Keeping it clean and well maintained would be a nontrivial effort, even if the arm includes programming to clean up after itself.

Probably like a billion dollars to develop the first prototype, and each copy would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, maybe eeking down into the tens of thousands of dollars range if they work really well and become inexplicably popular. Even then it would be up to the customer to keep it stocked with ingredients in a specially designed containers in the included pantry and refrigerator.

It's really the same reason McDonalds never really went through with that fully automated restaurant threat. A person can do the same job for minimum wage, so the robot will never be cost efficient unless someone else does all of the R&D for you, and even then it's highly dependent on being low maintenance.

mmcgaha 4 years ago | | |

Nothing like an experienced engineer to slow down progress. Give me a hungry engineer right out of school and we will get this thing done. Sure we may injure thousands of people in the process but we can deal with that after the product is on the market; oh yeah and I will blame the engineers for it too.

danielheath 4 years ago | | |

The thermomix seems the closest thing I can think of; automatic stir-while-heating covers a fair bit.

dr_dshiv 4 years ago | |

We call them embedded systems and customers call them dishwashers or air fryers or blenders. Those are the kitchen computers, no?

vel0city 4 years ago | | |

I do agree, many of our other appliances have become more computerized. My dishwasher has several different sensors which can change how it runs its cycles and dispense an automatic amount of soap based on detected dirtiness of dishes. My clothes washer is similar, and my drier works until the clothes reach a desired level of dryness instead of just a timer. My microwave's sensor cooking modes are surprisingly good, often when all I need to do is reheat food I just toss it in the microwave and hit "Reheat" and the microwave gets it right to steaming and stops without burning. All of these are driven by computers watching multiple sensors and constantly tweaking parameters of their operation to reach the desired final state.

Its still interesting though that it seems like in the 70's they were still expecting there would be some centralized computer in charge of it all while in reality computing got so small and so cheap its found its way to each appliance on its own.

dTal 4 years ago | | |

Modern appliances sometimes use computers because tiny SOCs are cheaper than electromechanical mechanisms, but the user interfaces of those appliances have scarcely changed. They haven't really caused much in the way of social change.

joshstrange 4 years ago |

I mean I have a dedicated iPad Mini 2 in my kitchen that I use Paprika [0] on, that feels pretty much in line with what was predicted (I don't do my calendaring or taxes on it but still). I know I'm far from alone in having this setup, multiple friends and family members use the same thing. Even growing up we had an older laptop in the kitchen for looking up recipes and the like (though that was very much so an outlier among my friends and their parents at that time).

[0] https://www.paprikaapp.com/

samsolomon 4 years ago | |

Fantastic app suggestion! I've been manually copying and pasting recipes I liked into Notion so they are all largely formatted the same—the download recipe functionality in Paprika is magic.

joshstrange 4 years ago | | |

I'm a huge fan of Paprika, their app is slick, they have apps on iOS/Android/Mac/Windows, and it all syncs. They have a ton of features under the hood that I don't even use (like meal planning, pantry management, etc) but I do love their shopping list feature. Just click the shopping cart icon on a recipe and it will let you add all the ingredients to one of your lists. You can easily uncheck all the things you already have and it respects recipe scaling and it will combine ingredients (so if one recipe has 2 tomatoes and you scale it 2x and then another recipe has 3 tomatoes and you leave it at 1x you will end up with 7 tomatoes on your list). Sometimes you need to clean up a recipe a little bit (brand name in the ingredient list or odd naming) but the nice part is you do that once then reap the benefits for forever.

Also, if you are feeling froggy, their cloud sync API is pretty easy to reverse engineer (it's a super basic REST service) so you can build on top of it or write little utilities if needed.

Having all my recipes in the same format is so nice and I can edit a recipe if I want to tweak it or if I find out that what a recipe called for wasn't quite right. Like the icing I make for my red velvet cupcakes called for an insane amount of powered sugar (aka confectioners sugar) and so I edited the recipe so next time I wouldn't over-buy the sugar. Same with tweaking the flavor profile, cook times, etc. And I can add things I always have to look up like sous vide temp/time, I just have a "Sous Vide Steak" "recipe" that has the times in the body of the instructions.

zwieback 4 years ago |

I think this is a general pattern: since the beginning of the industrial revolution people have been dreaming about robots doing things for us, replacing entire tasks. The reality is that putting computers into existing devices makes a lot more sense as mechanical household devices are already highly optimized. Sewing machines, kitchen appliances, cars, power tools are the result of decades of engineering so we replace the control systems and user interfaces with microcontrollers but leave the good stuff as-is.

Self-driving cars is one area where I could see a bigger shift: a dangerous activity that could perhaps be done better by machines, if the environment is adapted to prevent show-stopping accidents.

retrac 4 years ago | |

> since the beginning of the industrial revolution people have been dreaming about robots doing things for us

The dream is much older than that, I suspect. There are references to self-weaving looms, self-playing musical organs, self-grinding mills in classical literature, often in descriptions of some sort of idealized utopia or afterlife. But I think some in antiquity would have considered them quite possible in this life, if only their construction and the underlying principles were understood. That work, in the physics sense, can captured and redirected by machinery is an ancient realization. Around 20 AD a Greek poet (Antipater of Thessalonica) made a passing reference to how machines had already freed people from the toil of grinding grain by harnessing nature's power:

> Hold back your hand from the mill, you grinding girls; even if the cockcrow heralds the dawn, sleep on. For Demeter has imposed the labours of your hands on the nymphs, who leaping down upon the topmost part of the wheel, rotate its axle; with encircling cogs, it turns the hollow weight of the Nisyrian millstones. If we learn to feast toil-free on the fruits of the earth, we taste again the golden age.

zwieback 4 years ago | | |

Wonderful, from now on I'll be imagining nymphs powering anything that moves on its own. Thanks, Demeter!

tuatoru 4 years ago | |

> activity that could perhaps be done better by machines, if the environment is adapted to prevent show-stopping accidents.

Like Roombas. No pets, children, floorstanding houseplants, rugs, clothes left on the floor, etc.

For self-driving cars: no non-powered vehicles or pedestrians, no variant uses of the road, no road surface problems.

ryukafalz 4 years ago | |

> if the environment is adapted to prevent show-stopping accidents

And what exactly would that environment look like to those outside of a car?

zwieback 4 years ago | | |

lots of guardrails!

kps 4 years ago |

The article's “Honeywell, an early computer-maker that would later help power the Arpanet” is a journalistically muddled version of a more specific fact: the ‘Kitchen Computer’ was a Honeywell 316 in a pedestal case, and the 316 was also used for the ARPANET Interface Message Processor (i.e. router).

chihuahua 4 years ago |

The article has a link to a video about Moley Robotic's $338,000 robotic kitchen. It's quite eye-opening, because the robot appears to be a pair of arms/hands which can grab mise-en-place containers of ingredients, dump them into a saucepan, and stir them painfully slowly. I wonder:

- who peels and chops the vegetables etc that go into those containers?

- who cleans up the pots and utensils when the robot is done stirring and heating the food?

Ideally there would be another $300,000 robot for each of those two tasks, but I suspect the answer is that your (human) housekeeper is needed.

The video is worth watching just to laugh at how unbelievably slowly this $338,000 marvel is at stirring the contents of a saucepan.

The elevator pitch for Moley could be "Juicero, but for pasta"

pjc50 4 years ago | |

> - who peels and chops the vegetables etc that go into those containers?

> - who cleans up the pots and utensils when the robot is done stirring and heating the food?

Exactly. I'd want it the other way round: those are the boring tasks, give them to robots, let me mix and stir and watch and taste.

(Rule of thumb: if it's offstage in a cooking show or recipe tiktok, people want it automated)

rmason 4 years ago |

I lived through the era of the kitchen computers. I cannot prove it but I think this happened through a consumer focus group. In the sixties and seventies marketers loved consumer focus groups. They would always ask a couple off the wall questions. Like asking people if you had a computer in your house what would you imagine using it for and which room would it be in?

As a child in the sixties the only computers we saw on TV were either robots or the Jetsons kitchen computer. So this group decides that the kitchen computer is it. The Jetson's 'kitchen computer' would assemble and cook a complete meal from molecules. Similar to what Cana is doing for beverages.

https://www.cana.com/

So it became a fact that consumers wanted kitchen computers. Over a twenty year period multiple company's (mostly big stodgy companies wanting to get in on the hot new computer thing) brought out kitchen computers. I remember software companies for the TRS-80, Apple and IBM PC having recipe database programs.

They all were complete failures. People didn't want kitchen computers. What they wanted was to tell a machine what they wanted for dinner and it would build and cook it. As long as you kept the machine full of water and different molecules it would make Chicken Cordon Bleu one night and Duck a l'Orange the next night Still a neat idea and something I'd like for myself.

joezydeco 4 years ago | |

I grew up in that era too. It was interesting how narrow-minded the marketing was on these things, but we hadn't really explored ideas beyond the things you already did on paper (file recipes, balance checkbooks, track your investments).

Even Apple wasn't immune.

https://www.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/a2origi...

None of this really changed until VisiCalc came along.

codedokode 4 years ago |

Sorry for posting a comment unrelated to the article, but that site is broken. The cookie settings dialog, provided by a third-party company, doesn't work as promised.

When I opened the page, I saw a cookie banner, untoggled all toggles that were togglable and clicked "Reject all cookies". The cookie dialog said that there will be only functional cookies and they won't contain any personal information. How nice, I thought, Internet is changing for the better. I also can enjoy the privileges of EU citizens.

But then - just out of curiosity - I decided to see what cookies are left in my browser. Imagine my surprise when I saw 6 (six) cookies. Those included:

- an UUID with name 'stripe_mid' expiring in a year

- OptanonConsent, which, I assume, represents chosen settings and contains UUID in 'consentId' field. This UUID is set when the page is loaded. I guess they store your preferences on the server and not in cookies as I thought. Obviously, you can be tracked with this cookie as the identifier seems to be unique.

- user_geoip_fallback and user_geoip, both of which contain an IP address

To check that the dialog indeed doesn't work, I deleted all cookies except for cookies related to the consent dialog, and reloaded the page. Stripe and geoip cookies have been set again.

It turns out that you shouldn't trust cookie dialogs from that third-party company which you often see on different sites. They are either broken or intentionally deceive a user.

codedokode 4 years ago | |

By the way, I think that tracking the grocery is possible with today's technology, you just need to install several cameras in the fridge, so that you can connect with a smartphone and see what is missing. Maybe one could train a neural network to recognize kind and amount of products, but as there are so many of them, and so many different types of packaging, I think that this would be difficult.

justinlloyd 4 years ago |

General purpose computers:

First touch screen 27" AIO for recipes, balancing the household budget, watching videos, playing games, , video conferencing with family & work

Second touch screen 27" AIO for recipes, balancing the household budget, watching videos, video conferencing with family & work

Over-powered VR computer running the other touch screen

Smart dashboard AKA iPad that shows video feeds from security cameras, google calendars, weather forecast, location of phones, wallets, cats and other household information, plus "the funnies" from various news websites

Task specific computers:

A collection of iPads for handling multiple recipes and unit conversion

Device specific computers in the kitchen/dining room area:

Coffee robot AKA Jura J9

Water filter AKA ION Smart Filter

Plant monitoring AKA Raspbery Pi with a bunch of sensors

Not computerised:

The meal plan, which is simply scribbled on to a couple of rectangular glass white boards mounted to the end of a cabinet and clearly visible

What I have found lacking in my experience is not the concept of the kitchen computer, but the software to drive it. So much proposed software is lacking in the UX & UI area that most apps border on the useless.

chazeon 4 years ago |

Before opening this article I sure expect something like a computer in the kitchen, which for some people is the iMac 24 and for me it have been iPad Pro 12.9 + Magic Keyboard for 3 yrs. Surprised to see it was something like a cooking robot.

Epiphany21 4 years ago |

>Generations have debated the delegation of kitchen duties, often touching on class, race, and especially gender. Most frequently, women have taken on home cooking, which often means hard work for little or no pay.

The idea that men only started cooking at home less than a century ago is dumb. The idea that most people the world over didn't have loving family units even in prehistory is especially asinine. Also, anyone who expects to be paid for cooking their own food at home is living in their own little bourgeoisie bubble. That's ridiculous. I hope this satire.

Terry_Roll 4 years ago |

I think some people are trying to automate the wrong domains, there are easier challenges to solve around the house first, besides, people love eating out or getting a take away. If corporations thought there was some money in automating the kitchen, all the fast food chains would get together and build an automated kitchen which can be retro fitted into your existing kitchen and serve you up all your favourite take aways, but it aint happening, at least not for a decade.

There are better low hanging fruit to be had in the automation/robot domains, if you think about it.

wiradikusuma 4 years ago |

The robots pictured at the end of the article (and moley.com, also mentioned) mimic humans in cooking (i.e. "physically at work using hands"), but I can't help but wonder the operational issues.

Kitchen is messy. You can drop eggs on the floor, oil jumping out of stove making everything (including the robots) greasy, the stove knob must be turned in a specific way to make it work---which means there needs to be a human on standby, and that person will need to work extra cleaning the robot as well.

TYPE_FASTER 4 years ago |

I remember the first time I read "The Veldt" by Ray Bradbury.

kwertyoowiyop 4 years ago |

That “1956 kitchen of tomorrow” is still gorgeous and futuristic.

jdontillman 4 years ago | |

'Looks remarkably similar to The Simpsons' kitchen.

johnmarcus 4 years ago |

and by "Americans", you mean "large corporations with wares to sell."

mtoddsmith 4 years ago |

We have the google nest hub in our kitchen and use it for recipes, weather, Wikipedia or “kid questions” and news / YouTube, music and intercom. I just wish apple had the same since I’m on iPhone and now to pause and think is it “hey Siri” or “hey google”. Can I make google respond to “ hey Siri”?

blamazon 4 years ago |

In my kitchen my Google home unit is a very advanced timer, unit conversion device, and picture frame.

llsf 4 years ago |

I feel like those new all-in-one like Thermomix (https://www.thermomix.com) are the closest to a computer in the kitchen we have now. Europeans (and some star chefs in US) swear by it.

ahonhn 4 years ago |

I can open an app on my phone, swipe around a bit and within half an hour food of my choice will magically appear. Unfortunately this also involves money in my bank account disappearing so I can't afford to do it very often :-(

sklargh 4 years ago |

I would pay a lot, perhaps even give up my second car, for a Ghost Robotics or Boston Dynamics quadruped that could successfully and safely navigate my home, child put away dishes & fold laundry.

john_the_writer 4 years ago |

I watched the movie Demon Seed when I was young. Any one who wants a smart home should spend the time, and watch this. I suspect they'd change their mind.

oh_sigh 4 years ago | |

You're afraid your smart home device is going to kidnap and impregnate you?

kwertyoowiyop 4 years ago | | |

It can’t even stay connected to my wifi for more than a few days!

jaywalk 4 years ago | | |

You're not?

yazantapuz 4 years ago |

It is very, very hard to predict the future.

markus_zhang 4 years ago |

I love those retro future photos!