The Honeywell Kitchen Computer | Hacker News Reader

The Honeywell Kitchen Computer

rarehistoricalphotos.com

51 pointsmamoul14 comments

I have an older (first-generation) iPad dedicated to my kitchen, for recipes and viewing things while cooking.

It strikes me as the perfect place for it, these days.

I've considered, many times, what life would be like if the Kitchen iPad could connect to the fridge and the air fryer and coordinate my food intake planning and execution .. but I'm really, really not ready to let that level of control enter my life. Yet.

Its sort of amusing to see the level of intrusion that Honeywell were willing to accept .. but there was scant consideration given to the privacy issues. What a world we've created ..

I feel like this was probably their idea of an Onion article style humour at the time although it's obviously patronizing when looked at today.

Onion style humor is called satire. I don't believe Honeywell was aiming for satire, rather just a joke at the wife's expense.

I feel they thought it was satire. If you look at the Onion, it's often at someone's expense.

Related. Others?

When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31108439 - April 2022 (60 comments)

Honeywell 316 Kitchen Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30421628 - Feb 2022 (4 comments)

The oldest problem in computing - Recipes - How do you solve it? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=544666 - April 2009 (10 comments)

The $62,550 machine no one bought - Honeywell's Kitchen Computer remembered - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=378603 - Nov 2008 (3 comments)

Honeywell 316 Kitchen Computer (5 points, 3 years ago, 4 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30421628

When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021) (50 points, 3 years ago, 60 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31108439

The oldest problem in computing - Recipes - How do you solve it? (6 points, 16 years ago, 10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=544666

Thanks! Added above.

… and then they pivoted to B2B ;)

Any ideas on what the font is in the 3rd image? I like it.

‘MENU SELECTION BY HONEYWELL KITCHEN COMPUTER’

If you Google "classic computer font that's on cheques", you'll find it as the first result.

The amusing thing is that there never was such a computer-readable text font.

The original Magnetic Ink Character Recognition digits still seen on paper checks are from a set that only has numbers and some delimiters. There are no letters in MICR. Anything that looks like that font with letters is a dated attempt to look futuristic.

MICR digits are really a kind of bar code. They were originally read by a one-track magnetic head.[1] The waveform out represents only how much ink is present. But it doesn't matter to the magnetic reader where the ink is placed vertically within the read track. That's why the digit forms are so weird, with those varying-width lines.

Bank of America had the first MICR readers and check sorters custom built. This was so successful that it powered BofA to become the biggest bank in the world at the time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Recording_Machine,_...

> Anything that looks like that font with letters is a dated attempt to look futuristic.

Or a modern attempt to look retro-futuristic.

Though obviously not in this case.

To expand on this, the scifi fonts that originate in this, start with the Westminster typeface: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_(typeface) An early competitor was called "Data 70". Countless variants emerged later, but Westminster is the earliest variant I know of.

In my childhood, these typefaces were more or less synonymous with scifi, future and computer stuff. If you DIDN'T use this typeface, you had to come up with an explanation for why you didn't..

While many orders of magnitude more performant it is funny when my GPU pulls the same amount of power as that huge computer

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