[le-mark]

>> 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.

[cr0sh]

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.

[bitwize]

> 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.

[syntheticnature]

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.