[HN Gopher] When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
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When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
Author : redshirt
Score : 29 points
Date : 2022-04-21 12:14 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| [deleted]
| yazantapuz wrote:
| It is very, very hard to predict the future.
| mtoddsmith wrote:
| 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"?
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| That "1956 kitchen of tomorrow" is still gorgeous and futuristic.
| jdontillman wrote:
| 'Looks remarkably similar to The Simpsons' kitchen.
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sammalloy wrote:
| This sounds great, and I'm ready to download the app, but
| the problem is that most of my recipes come from Facebook
| groups, YouTube, Insta, and Pinterest, and while some of
| them have corresponding web pages for the ingredients
| lists, many of them do not, which would make the web import
| feature non-functional, if I'm not mistaken. I wish there
| was a way all of these sites could share metadata for
| ingredients that the app could read.
|
| Another future feature that would be nice and convenient is
| to add in-house aisle shopping directions to the smart
| grocery lists for selected (or default) grocery stores. I
| know stores like Safeway share this info with apps like
| DoorDash (possibly UberEats as well), and both Home Depot
| and Target apps have aisle by aisle directions too, so it's
| not beyond the realm of the possible to include this
| feature. Being able to view a smart grocery list in my
| kitchen and then to go to the store with aisle by aisle
| directions is a dream of mine.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| I remember the first time I read "The Veldt" by Ray Bradbury.
| john_the_writer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You're afraid your smart home device is going to kidnap and
| impregnate you?
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| It can't even stay connected to my wifi for more than a few
| days!
| jaywalk wrote:
| You're not?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I've been following teledildonics since the early 90s, and
| unfortunately I can say we're a long way away from that.
| blamazon wrote:
| In my kitchen my Google home unit is a very advanced timer, unit
| conversion device, and picture frame.
| johnmarcus wrote:
| and by "Americans", you mean "large corporations with wares to
| sell."
| kps wrote:
| 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).
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I love those retro future photos!
| chihuahua wrote:
| 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"
| chazeon wrote:
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zwieback wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zwieback wrote:
| Articulated robot arm sounds like the most flexible
| solution. Trickiest part here would be safety - any robot
| with the power to chop, grind, cut would also have to have
| a good safety system or be enclosed.
|
| Right now I'm thinking about tasks I don't enjoy: chopping
| onions, peeling carrots or potatoes, anything where I have
| to touch meat. All those would require very advanced
| sensing. Come to think it, that last one brings up the
| important topic of food safety and sanitation, the whole
| thing would have to be able to withstand a washdown.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Not to mention the risk of fire if something goes wrong
| in the cooking process. (Or, less directly, the risk of
| getting sick from improperly-cooked food.)
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I'm thinking here of ill-fated robot kitchen startup Zume's
| pizza robots. You can probably still find videos of them in
| operation on YouTube. The things that most struck me when I
| watched one were how _slow_ they are at what they do, how
| much space they took up, and how much human intervention
| they required to operate.
| zwieback wrote:
| 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.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| lots of guardrails!
| trgn wrote:
| Slower speeds hoepfully. Imagine golf carts tottering
| around the city. That's the automated driving of the
| future. Not the current mad max roads, but with robots.
| Instead, some florida retiree town, but with robots.
| retrac wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Wonderful, from now on I'll be imagining nymphs powering
| anything that moves on its own. Thanks, Demeter!
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