Baby Boomers grew up with a certain ideal of what the future would hold for them, and most of that ideal came from the show The Jetsons. For me, there was nothing cooler than the computer Jane Jetson had in her kitchen. There was no cooking whatsoever, as the computer popped out perfect meals every time. It turns out that wasn't just a fantasy.
There was a kitchen computer offered back then in a Neiman-Marcus ad. It did really exist, but they never sold any. It wasn't quite as cool a the one in The Jetsons either. It s based on a Honeywell microcomputer that was a seller on its own, but on the kitchen pedestal that was being offered, it didn't hold much interest for people.
Perhaps the many accoutrements that went along with the kitchen computer was the holdup. It's not like you could tell it to make a meal like Jane did, and it would just spit it out. It was a 100-pound machine that cost $10,000. It needed a teletype hooked up to it, as well as a paper tape reader. And it didn't spit food out, just the instructions for making a meal.
There was only one kitchen computer of this type made, and it now resides in the Computer History Museum. And now, we have MacBooks, iPhones, and iPads that we drag into our kitchen to help us plan a meal. We can use Siri to search recipes by speaking, and recognizing speech is something the kitchen computer couldn't do. We don't need to print anything out. And on top of that, we get pictures and videos with these recipes too.
However, our iPhones and iPads won't cook the food for us. This is what I was really wanting out of the Jetsons kitchen computer. I want it to cook for me. I'll have to keep waiting. In the meantime, I'll just be satisfied with my husband cooking for me on the weekends.
Photo Credit: Computer History Museum
