From UNIVAC to Google: a computer in every kitchen?

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: Universal Automatic Computer

THE 1969 Neiman Marcus catalog included a futuristic product called the Honeywell Kitchen Computer. The red and white trapezoidal machine came equipped with an H316 minicomputer, a pedestal, a cutting board, and a handful of preprogrammed recipes. This tarted-up recipe box--which did not slice, dice, or make julienne fries--could be yours for a mere $10,600. None was sold, probably because in 1969 that sum could purchase at least three automobiles. It didn't help that the only interface was a collection of blinking lights and switches, or that you needed two weeks of classes to learn to use the bulky machine. In the end, there wasn't a single '60s housewife willing to learn binary to access her own recipes.

The kitchen computer, like the much more user-friendly Mac Powerbook on which this article was written, was descended from UNIVAC, the first commercial computer in the United States. Brought to market by the now defunct company Remington Rand in 1951, UNIVAC (an acronym for Universal Automatic Computer) did not incorporate a single recipe for Jell-O salad. It did, however, accurately predict Eisenhower's surprise landslide victory over Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election using a small sample of voters in key states. In Core Memory: A Visual History of Vintage Computers (Chronicle Books), former Wired culture editor John Alderman writes that this demonstration of predictive prowess "helped further solidify the hopes and fears that the general public had about these wondrous but scary machines."

Core Memory's glowing, vibrant photographs of ancient computers capture the complicated, worshipful, suspicious relationship we have always had with our machines. To modern Americans, the constant physical tune-ups required by the room-sized UNIVAC--its 5,000 vacuum tubes burned out one at a time and had to be replaced constantly--and the weeks of binary lessons for the Kitchen Computer seem ridiculously laborious, especially for such a small amount of computing power. But even as our computers become mightier, they still demand our constant attention and loving vigilance with their software updates, virus protection, chiming alerts for incoming mail, and occasional crashes. Lest we look down our noses at the devoted operators of those early elephantine calculators, consider how much time you spend worshiping at the altar of your computer--awaiting its pronouncements, diagnosing its illnesses, asking it to spit back your own words and...