[Domotica] If You Can't Stand the Coding, Stay Out of the Kitchen: Three Chapters in the History of Home Automation

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History of Computing #3
If You Can't Stand the Coding, Stay Out of the Kitchen
Three Chapters in the History of Home Automation

by Dag Spicer

    "A house is a machine for living in."

    - Le Corbusier

As time passes, visions of the future ultimately face reality. In
computer history, the time scale of "yesterday's tomorrow's" takes place
on the exponential substrate of Moore's Law, giving predictions a
half-life unknown in almost any other field.

Despite this runaway avalanche of technique, cultural factors remain
remarkably constant across time. A particular cultural "meme" that seems
to never die is that of the American kitchen as a site where technology,
in the name of "increased leisure time," bumps its head against the real
world of driving kids to school, making dinner, and washing dishes. Here
are three of the stranger episodes in the history of computing where
kitchens and computers have collided.
Mrs. Sutherland's Kitchen

In 1966, Jim Sutherland, an engineer with the Westinghouse Corporation,
created the machine known as the "Electronic Computing Home Operator,"
or ECHO IV. [Figure 1] ECHO IV was a home automation system,
hand-crafted with surplus electronic parts and enclosed in oiled-walnut
wooden cabinetry, that computerized many of the household chores
formerly undertaken by Mrs. Sutherland.
Figure 1: "Electronic Computing Home Operator" was designed and built by
Westinghouse engineer Jim Sutherland in 1966.

The family finances were completed "automatically," and, according to
the April 1968 issue of Popular Mechanics, the Sutherlands were
extending the system to store recipes, compute shopping lists, track
family inventory, control home temperature, turn appliances on and off,
and predict the weather. One of the features Sutherland was most excited
about was ECHO's ability to act as a family message center, a place
where people could leave notes to each other. Not everyone was pleased:
As the system expanded to take over the family basement recreation room,
Mrs. Sutherland was heard to ask: "Will it replace me?"

Sutherland's idea found more public expression when, a year later,
Neimann-Marcus advertised the "Kitchen Computer," on the front page of
its catalog for 1969. The Kitchen Computer was a $10,600 Honeywell
minicomputer, in futuristic packaging, designed to store
recipes-presumably for the housewife who had everything. One of the
Kitchen Computer's main marketing claims was that it could tell you what
you could make with the ingredients you had on hand, an attempt to
digitize the kind of tacit knowledge that a good cook learns from years
of experience or family tradition. Such "de-skilling" is a common
feature of most forms of automation, an outcome suggested even by the
advertisement itself, which had the now-unimaginable tag line: "If she
can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute." [Figure 2] As far as is
known, no Kitchen Computers were ever sold.
Culture Clash

The problem with the Kitchen Computer as a "convenience" was technical
as well as cultural. Technically, there was no means to input or output
characters, and interaction with the built-in recipe file was by front
panel switch. Even Honeywell's marketing literature shows an attached
Teletype, leaving one to wonder how much of a timesaver the Kitchen
Computer could really be. The purchase came with a two-week programming
course as well (in a language known as BACK), highlighting this
deficiency and making the product absurd from a consumer point of view.
Figure 2: Original advertisement for the Kitchen Computer. "If she can
only cook as well as Honeywell can compute." Ouch.

Culturally, one must ask whether it was likely that anyone who could
afford to spend over $10,000-the price of a small suburban home in
1969-on a device to store recipes would really be doing any cooking.
With that kind of budget, the solution would likely be a live-in chef or
the traditional 3x5 card file, no?

This meme is still a potent driver of technology, or at least marketing.
Consider the announcement last year by Electrolux of an Internet
Refrigerator, the "Screenfridge." [Figure 3] Screenfridge is a machine
that includes a flat panel display in the door allowing family members
to record and play back messages to each other or to anyone outside
their home via e-mail. It also has a built-in web browser; a recipe
engine that tells you what you can cook with what you have in the fridge
(sound familiar?); an integral barcode scanner that will order more food
for you over the Web and arrange delivery; a built-in TV and radio; and
connection to home security cameras.

In one significant way, the Screenfridge differs from the ECHO IV and
the Kitchen Computer. While these early attempts have a certain
innocence (or at least naivete), the Screenfridge reflects the more
commodified cultural landscape of the 21st century, and its marketing
model is pure Orwell, as the on-line brochure makes plain: "The price of
the Screenfridge will depend on several variables. When we go to market
with this product we may try non-traditional business models such as
lowering the price to consumers in return for displaying banners on
their fridge doors."
The Illusion of Saved Labor

What deeper connections can we draw between these objects that span
three decades? First, there is a desire for control of the everyday
processes that frame our lives, something these machines embed in theory
if not in practice, of technology structuring a choreography of the
mundane played out via computers. We believe, or want to believe, in
technology as a simplifier of our lives, and in the face of
contradictory evidence, we adopt an ambivalent perspective rather then
rejecting technology outright. The more successful products seem to be
the simplest, ones that make straightforward claims and have obvious
benefits (i.e., no required programming courses).

Second, these three examples reflect the profound qualitative shift in
computers that occurred in about the mid-1970s from machines that were
pure "number-crunchers" to devices that enable communication,
visualization, and entertainment. Electrolux explicitly notes that the
refrigerator is a central meeting place for any household; something
every family member interacts with on a daily basis and thus a 'natural'
hub for the various activities their fridge enables, precisely what Jim
Sutherland said about his ECHO IV. These reflect changes in what people
thought computers could be-and underline how Screenfridge lies within a
tradition of which Sutherland's ECHO IV and the Kitchen Computer form a
part.
Figure 3: Electrolux Screenfridge, invented over thirty years after the
Kitchen Computer and the ECHO IV.

Finally, all three devices reveal a cultural desire for control in the
home, control that promises "increased leisure time" and similar
life-enhancing benefits, and whose realization or practicality become
submerged in a surface faith in technology. As homemakers long ago
realized, claims of increased leisure time are generally illusory.

Le Corbusier's comment at the beginning of this column suggests a model
for the home as something mechanical that supports human life. Whereas
once computers in the home stayed put, we can now expect a second
qualitative change, driven by the Web, to emerge within five years: a
change to ubiquitous computing in which the distinction between the home
and its occupants becomes blurred.

How becoming ever more CPU-like is meant to be liberating (as inputs are
fed into us from every direction) is unclear. The level of interactivity
will be much more demanding, moving from quiescent devices that serve
when asked (e.g., a toaster) to interrupt-generating "intelligent"
peripherals-cum-appliances that demand user input. Rather than occupying
several square feet, today's kitchen computer might be built in to a
cookbook; today's ECHO IV runs on a PC with an X-10 (or similar) home
interface adapter; and today's more upscale homes already come pre-wired
with networking and low voltage DC control infrastructures. Prospective
homebuyers will soon be asking: "How long does it take to master this
place's API?"

As Upside magazine recently noted about Larry Ellison's home, you know
you've really arrived when your house has its own Chief Information
Officer.

The Kitchen Computer and the ECHO IV form part of The Computer Museum
History Center's permanent collection.
  Honeywell H316 (Kitchen Computer) specifications  
 
Architecture: Stored program, single-address, binary, parallel,
general-purpose minicomputer

Word size: 16 bits

Memory: magnetic core; 4K basic, expandable to 16K

Cycle time: 1.6s

Add time: 3.2s

Logic: 2 MHz DTL (Diode-Transistor-Logic); some 5 MHz logic.

System clock: 2.5 MHz

Power consumption: 475 W @ 125VAC

Weight: Approx. 150 lbs

Applications: FORTRAN IV, Assembler (DAP-16), DOS, EXEC-16, extensive
user library (> 500 programs).
 

This column is partly based on a paper I delivered at the Alien
Intelligence conference at Kiasma, the National Museum of Contemporary
Art, Helsinki, Finland, March, 2000.
For Further Reading

"Computer Carries Family Load in Engineer's Suburban Home," Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette, September 24, 1966.

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household
Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, New York: Basic Books,
1985.

Honeywell H316 General Purpose Digital Computer, Sales Kit, 316-C 6703,
1969. TCMHC #102618205

Honeywell H316 General Purpose Digital Computer, Summary Brochure, 316-S
76920, 1969. TCMHC #102618207

Programmer's Reference Manual, H316 and DDP-516 General Purpose
Computer, 316-S 76920, April,1969, Honeywell Doc No. 70130072156A,
M-490. TCMHC #102618206

The Screenfridge: http://www.electrolux.com/screenfridge/

Popular Mechanics, April 1968.

More images of the ECHO IV and the Kitchen Computer.

(TCMHC numbers refer to documents from The Computer Museum History
Center's permanent archive).

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