Friday, November 15, 2013

The Kitchen Computer

The Kitchen Computer

It's the perfect computer for my kitchen.  I'll have to find one.  I'm sure you can play kill-the-bit on it while waiting for the food to cook.  Check out the genuine vintage sexism in the original photo caption.  Mind you, this is sexism from Neiman-Marcus PR flacks against a chef who can read binary and enter her recipes using toggle switches.  My mother and aunt Jane hand-built mad scientist radar research prototypes at MIT during WWII.  They never really wanted to learn to cook, though. I had to scrounge through the cupboards on my own.

The described UI is wonderful.  It's too bad they don't have a photo of that part.

I knew this generation of computer hardware rather inimately.  I hand-debugged H316 hardware in Alston, MA in the dead of night, part of my early internet plumbing days which extended to debugging Pluribae (plural of Pluribus?) at BBN.  They had Tenex at BBN, of course, and I developed a sort of channeling skill where I could discover commands and APIs by absorbing the mindset of the developers.   There was no documentation.  Channeling the developers' mindset continues to come in handy.





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