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by bitwize 3230 days ago
Funnily enough, microcomputers themselves were once the technology solution in search of a problem. The "home computer" fad of the 80s promised lots of applications that didn't quite pan out, including finance, "helping kids with the homework", "the little lady can store her recipes", and home automation. The only ones that really panned out were games (including edutainment), spreadsheets, word processing, and maybe small single-user databases. Anything more required much more sophisticated and expensive equipment, which wouldn't become commonplace till around the 386 era.
2 comments
davemp 3230 days ago
> finance, "helping kids with the homework", "the little lady can store her recipes", and home automation. The only ones that really panned out were games (including edutainment), spreadsheets, word processing, and maybe small single-user databases.

finance -> spreadsheets

"helping kids with the homework" -> word processing

"the little lady can store her recipes" -> small single-user databases

Sounds to me like they all panned out except home automation.

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bitwize 3230 days ago
"Helping kids with the homework" I meant more in terms of using the machine as a study tool. Aside from edutainment titles, this didn't catch on until online encyclopedias and then the internet took root.

Using a computer to store recipes was wildly impractical. Using it to do basic CRM or point-of-sale tasks with a small relational or navigational database was much more appropriate.

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le-mark 3230 days ago
>> the little lady can store her recipes

That's a great perspective, and I'm really glad you mentioned this in particular. It's one of those things that was so often repeated, and I always found it to be really bizarre. Recipes? Really?

I'd add music synth to your list of real world uses, in some sense that was a killer app for microprocessors.

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cr0sh 3230 days ago
This machine - a 16-bit computer from 1969 (!) - was marketed as a "kitchen computer", among other things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_316

Seriously.

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bitwize 3230 days ago
> I'd add music synth to your list of real world uses, in some sense that was a killer app for microprocessors.

You're right. The Altair 8080 famously didn't do anything useful at all upon its release. It wasn't until someone in the Homebrew Computer Club discovered that the radio interference its CPU generated could play tones on an AM radio by buzzing the CPU in loops that a use was found for it.

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syntheticnature 3230 days ago
It was probably one of the more obvious examples for a simple non-relational database, neglecting that those early implementations tended to not have any advantages over a card file, and often made things less usable.
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