El Reg has a write-up on the amazingly beautiful and hopelessly impractical Honeywell Kitchen Computer. We’ve covered this bizarre piece of computing history before on OSNews, in my list of the ten most beautiful computers. For those that have no idea what I’m talking about, read on for more details. Trust me, you want to know.
The Honeywell H316 is a computer made for the housewife in 1969, which was designed to be used in a kitchen as a recipe storage device. It came with a built-in cutting board, and was accompanied by an apron. It was powered by a 0.6-2.5Mhz processor (reports are inconclusive), 4kb of memory (expandable to 16kb), and it didn’t have a display – it had a set of binary lights which conveyed the data. It had to be programmed by using switches, so when you bought this machine, you received a free two weeks programming course.
Programming the device was reportedly quite difficult. Combine all this with a pricetag of over USD 10000, and you’ve got yourself the greatest flop in computing history: not a single Kitchen Computer has ever been sold. Which is a very sad thing, because this means the H316 is very obscure, and very, very rare. I would give up quite a lot just to be able to see and touch one.
This thing walked straight out of Fallout 3.
You’ve got to see this brochure!
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Honeywell/Honeywe…
Talk about detail on a brochure of the hardware tech specs.
The 1.6 microsecond memory timing referenced in the brochure suggests the 0.6MHz figure. (1.6µs translates to 625KHz) Remember, no cache. If it did run at 2.5MHz, it ran at an *effective* 0.6MHz.
Adequate for most 1960s kitchen computing workloads. The complimentary programming course and bundled Shish-kabuntu were a nice touch, too.
Edited 2008-11-29 04:54 UTC
Note that 625 kHz x 4 = 2.5 MHz. Many CPUs used to require multiple clock cycles to execute instructions. That was the difference between a clock cycle and a machine cycle.
Enough for today too, I’d say. After all, kitchen recipes haven’t become more complex, and ~1MHz is more than enough to drive the UI of a recipe storage. Although, of course, you’d take a cheap ~25MHz microcontroller today, simply because they aren’t more expensive.
No, it wasn’t the CPU that doomed this device.
But what we expect from computers has become more complex. First of all we’d expect a pretty and responsive GUI fully in line with all the latest apps. Secondly we’d expect to be able to do searches like, show me all cold vegetarian appetizers using eggs and asparagus, but no leeks, and we’d expect the search to be instantanious. We’d also expect it to search online for a recipe if it couldn’t find anything stored locally, and to play mp3s to us while we cook. If we where even more demanding we might expect it to come up with wine suggestions based on the ingredients in a menu using some sort of AI routine. No way you could do all of that with a 25MHz microcontroller.
…Actually that sounds like a fun project. I might have to give it a go.
I would totally use that
Awesome device indeed, I would have been quite insulted if my husband/boyfriend bought me something like that
It’s maybe just my opinion but it looks absolutely horrible, wouldn’t fit in any good-looking kitchen and it is seriously impractical, even the “analog” pen-and-paper method for storing my recipes works better.. 
Honestly, they should have just waited a few years with that thing so they could have made even a slightly more useable user-interface :3
Well, I think the article is probably a little misleading. This was a regular Honeywell model cross-marketed for the kitchen. What they show in the pictures is, I believe, just the console and cpu, not intended to be used directly for i/o any more than, say, the IBM 360 console was. From the brochure, which doesn’t say anything at all about kitchen use, but does contain an amusing photo of Bob Barker with his head vaporized:
You may choose any of the three styles:
table-top; rack-mountable, in standard 19-inch RETMA rack; and pedestal with desk-height controls, writing table, convenience, and futuristic styling.
So it can go in the living room, and an attached teletype (presumably sold separately) would be in the kitchen. Recipes could be stored on paper tape, read and written from the paper tape reader/writer on the teletype, or to the disc storage in the pantry, the drum storage in the bath room, the mag tape unit in the dining room, or on cards generated by the keypunch machine in the den. Presumably, some accessories would be available only from the manufacturer and not directly from Neiman-Marcus.
So I would say that your worries about fitting the console into your kitchen are unfounded.
Edited 2008-11-29 15:29 UTC
That would still make it impractical, even leaving the “big box” in each room aside. Just imagine using a teletype with greasy fingers while you prepare a meal…
True. Using a keyboard with greasy fingers didn’t become popular until the late 90s.
Edited 2008-11-29 16:04 UTC
Yeah, clearly, this machine was ahead of its time.
Edited 2008-11-29 17:05 UTC
Not to mention one-handed browsing… LOL…
[quote]Honestly, they should have just waited a few years with that thing so they could have made even a slightly more useable user-interface :3[/quote]
It looks more like something that would fit on the Enterprise’s bridge (Origonal Trek) than something that would go in the kitchen.
Maybe if there is still a working one around, we can teach it to detect lies, pinpoint lifeforms, etc.
My vote was for the Apple 3 computer. A friend of mine had one we would use after school to play games on. It was a frustrating machine. There was little software available for it and we had to use an Apple 2 E emulator to run software on the Apple 3. Running the programs though emulation caused havoc with games. I think it was the one system where Apple really messed up.
IN the mid-70’s I used the H316’s industrial cousin, the H116, to program the telemetry for both the Poseidon and Trident missiles.
Since my only I/O was a 10-character per second ASR-33 teletype, everything had to be done manually. This meant I wrote down the symbolic assembly code on a paper pad; hand-translated into octal machine code; and finally keyed in the binary using the 16 lights and switches.
To help debug, I set an AM transistor radio on top of the computer cabinet. If tuned to the static between stations, I could listen to the program running and hear every loop running.
My H116 had memory cores almost the size of small Cheerio’s and took a lot of current to operate. If the program spent too much time in too few instructions, the core would overheat and crack, if not smoke and burn.
Talk about programming close to the metal..
omg… debugging with a radio! Hearing the radio! If I was to debug my programs like that… I would go crazy!
As for the Honeywell machine, anybody understand how the display was?? How could you display a recipe without text?!? Asking housewives to read binary data from a minuscule screen is asking for troubles…
I actually used an AM radio for debugging an embedded DSP product just a couple years ago. It really did help to hear what part of our 1-second processing loop the embedded software was spending its time in.
We also found we could drop our RFI emissions by 10db just by changing the software to take it easier on the external SRAM bus. That really helped with the FCC limits under a deadline…
-braddock
Actually, one interacted with this system via an ASR33 (a hard copy teletype) and a card reader, neither of which is shown in the photo referenced.
Yes, the concept of using this system as a “kitchen computer” was another brain-damaged marketing idea from Honeywell. Honeywell’s marketing focus always was, up until the time they divested their computer business, almost exclusively targeted toward their large mainframes. These idiots really had no idea how to market minicomputers, and actually saw them as a threat to their large-scale business.
However, Honeywell’s minicomputers, both the x16 line, as well as the later Level 6/DPS6 line actually were quite successful in spite of the corporate focus on and bias towards their mainframes.
It was a real shame that Honeywell drove their computer business into the ground through stupid marketing decisions, particularly when Honeywell Information Systems had many very sharp technicians and engineers. Some of their more notable contributions were the first secure timesharing system (MULTICS), work on the ARPANET (forerunner to the Internet), and a system (SCOMP) that received the highest ever Orange Book rating from the NSA for multi-level security.
Disclaimer – I worked for Honeywell Federal Systems Division for 17 years.
In the honeywell pictures, my thoughts go right to the Jetsons view of the future as TV shows often projected it back then and the family robots that thankfully never arrived.
Long ago in a hardware lab environment at Texas Instruments I used to hook up the address bus of the 9900 to a scope, upper 8 bits on the x axis and lower 8 bits on the y axis using crude R2R networks to do rough D/A conversion.
The result was a randomish type of spirograph that quite nicely showed what the state of the running program was in. As you interacted with the software, the pattern would change to recognizeable patterns, well it intrigued passers by anyway.
you’d have to be a real supernerd to think that this had a chance as a consumer appliance.
a built-in cutting board.”
Priceless
Is the project to port Linux to it going to start?
When I see pictures of this thing, I can only think of Fallout, where it shows all the 50s style videos, but they have robots doing the dishes, etc.
You know most engineers were really high on the weed back then. All the designs for ‘the future’ were red and aerodynamic looking.
Linux has always been way too bloated to ever have had a hope of being ported to this machine
There’s probably a few things the processor hardware is missing that Linux would require, too, as it’s not certain that this machine has a paged memory manage unit, based on the description.
Well, 16k is a bit tight, to say the least. Even for uclinux:
http://tinyurl.com/583a9p
I think we can be pretty sure that it doesn’t. However, uclinux does not need one.
Maybe having a pop-up screen and the keyboard in place of the cutting-board?
Nah… somebody probably did it already. 😛