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Comment by MarkLowenstein | Hacker News Reader

Reliving the days when the possibilities were endless and we weren't already captured by an entrenched computing path is important. 50 years ago, every marketer intuited that a home computer would be used for storing recipes. It never happened. Why not? (Reasons aren't hard to come up with, but the process of doing so draws our imagination toward what computer interfaces could have been and should still be.)

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> "[...] every marketer intuited that a home computer would be used for storing recipes. It never happened."

Storing recipes "never happened"? Rubbish! Even famous cook Casey Ryback used his Apple Newton to store recipes, as evidenced in the 1995 documentary Under Siege 2 [1].

1. [https://starringthecomputer.com/feature.html?f=23]

Yeah easy to say that but that is because they are the elite. They have a newton, do you? I don't! Time for Newton 2, I mean they are doing iPod sock 2 so why not Newton 2.

I still have my Newton but I wasn't, nor am I, elite.

I didn't store recipes on it, though.

I would love to see a new Newton with the same spirit of innovation but current tech. Current phones are so boring. No innovation, just slow evolution.

It really was way ahead of its time. I remember the handwriting recognition being excellent for the time, too. Meanwhile Palm forced its users to write each letter one at a time in a tiny box and requiring specific sequencing of each stroke too.

Newton had a modem module you could plug in and third parties had written web browsers for it, it basically was the first smart phone just without the phone.

Trying to imagine that level of innovation, but starting from present day tech, is very interesting.

I had the message pad 100 and a message pad 120. My handwriting improved, and it s recognition also improved. It was brilliant. I stored shopping lists and recipes on it. Although a lot of fun was made of the handwriting recognition, it was surprisingly good, and got better with use.

We thought about selling a recipe program for the Mac. The tag line was going to be "The only time you want a mouse in your kitchen."

Hey, I store recipes on my home computer! Having a portable handheld terminal that can view the recipes makes it much more practical than it would have been in the 80s.

What recipe storing app do you use?

vim

Once you have been doing computing for long enough, the best solution is a very well formatted text file.

When on Windows I organise my entire work flow in Notepad.

I use AnyList for recipes, grocery/shopping lists and checklists. It’s a great app!

I keep my bread recipes in Google Keep on my phone. It's extremely useful, since the phone takes up much less room on the counter than the laptop does.

Obsidian

It didn't? Who knows how many copies of Americas_test_kitchen.pdf are floating around out there, how many recipes are in Apple notes or in Google Keep. Sure, you might just Google for "banana bread recipe" and get lost on a tangent about technology, and the smartphone isn't the personal computer of yore, but recipes existing in a digital format has happened.

I think in the context of the GP's comment, 'never' means it never (or hardly ever) happened on the products it was expected to happen on (home computers, as understood circa late 70s/early 80s). Yes, it has happened on very different devices decades later.

Spot on. The home computer never became accessible from the kitchen, and the storage system most anyone uses for recipes, if not paper, is the web or some other internet-accessible source. (Don't know for sure but I'd bet photos of recipes found online, viewed on a phone, is the most common.)

My spouse does. Google docs provides an editable, sharable, easy to use way to do recipes.

RE ".... a home computer would be used for storing recipes...."

No doubt, some home computers where used for this purpose, However, (QUICKLY) much more interesting applications where discovered, for example games and educational applications, business applications, engineering applications including spreadsheets ... Look at old software catalogs of software around 1980 (say) .. to verify this range of available applications or CD application archive CDs .....

Example Apple II catalog from cira 1980 from archive.org https://ia903201.us.archive.org/12/items/Programma_Catalog_S...

Interesting that by far the majority of the programs in this catalog happen to be games.

What are you talking about? I store recipes in my computer, and routinely look them up on Google.

The spirit of GWBasic lives! How do you view them when you're cooking? Do you print them from your home computer or do you use a mobile screen?

Some are Word documents that I view on my phone. (Via OneDrive).

My turkey recipe is a PDF that I print out two copies of when I prepare the turkey. My hands get messy (and unsanitary) when I follow it, so I don't want to handle my phone.

(In case you're curious: When I called up a BBS for the first time as a teenager, I didn't realize that I had to make up a name for myself. My GWBasic manual was sitting in front of me, so I just called myself GWBasic and really liked the name. At the time, GWBasic was very obsolete, so most people didn't get the reference.)

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