It’s not that personal computers had zero utility before the Internet, but it was sort of like designing a Bugatti solely for the purpose of parallel parking, no paved streets or highways or racetracks yet in sight. The Micro Cookbook, for instance, was software intended to make meals a snap, but it didn’t quite live up to its promise. From a 1984 New York Times article by Erik Sandberg-Diment:

The Micro Cookbook promises a lot on its cover, from the adjusting of recipes for a variable number of servings to nutrition and calorie and food-buying guidelines. On the subject of inventory control in the larder, it delivers a fillip of particular interest to hosts like me who reside in the hinterlands, and to those prone to entertain company after grocers’ hours. “Tell your computer what ingredients you have,” the cover instructs, “and Micro Cookbook will give you all the recipes you need to surprise your favorite guests.” It would be interesting to see if the computer could solve my pre-dawn predicament.

There are two disks to the Micro Cookbook. First the software disk, which runs the program, is fed to the computer. Once that has been ingested, the recipe disk is inserted into the disk drive. The Micro Cookbook is menu-driven, which is not a pun, but computerese for a type of program in which the computer, instead of asking questions, simply presents a lot of choices, from among which the operator makes his selection by filling in the blanks on the screen. The main menu in this case presented me with a number of alternatives. I could be shown the recipe index, an ingredients index, a breakdown of recipes into categories such as “French,” “dessert” and “meatless,” and so on. Submenus could be called up to show actual recipes on the screen, to interpret terminology, and even to print out (if you have a printer) a shopping list for any given recipe.

After experimenting for a while with the various alternatives, none of which I found enthralling enough to distract me from my original goal, I returned to the fillip that had attracted my attention in the first place, mainly, finding something interesting to concoct from the particular ingredients on hand. I entered my choice: “Select from ingredient list.” The screen lit up with a catalogue of ingredients ranging from stew beef to cheddar cheese – white sauce, cognac, pignoli, Bisquick, kasha, white raisins, tortillas and some 150 others being thrown together between these two entries with less organization than that to be found in our Fibber McGee kitchen pantry. Matching what I had on hand with the screen representations, I selected cumin, horseradish and sausage and sat back to see what the computer could cook up.

The word “sausage” didn’t quite fit into the space allowed. But since it was short only the “e,” and since in many programs of this type the software is designed to work with the first half or the first two-thirds of the word, I didn’t give that problem much thought. However, in this case it didn’t work, or maybe the program found the combination of sausage with cumin and horseradish not to its taste. Whatever the case, I was greeted by a rude raspberry emanating from the program: “Serious error … Terminating!” and terminate it did, just like that, everything stopped dead in its tracks and the computer shut down. I checked the “Error Messages” section of the manual, but it would admit to nothing so impolite as terminating.

That meant I had to reload first the software disk and then the recipe disk. Meanwhile, I was becoming really hungry. I entered only the cumin this time, to be on the safe side. “Swiss cheese salad red sauce,” responded the computer, while the video screen asked me to type in which recipe I desired. Since the intriguing, if mysterious Swiss cheese salad red sauce appeared to be my only choice, that’s what I typed in. However, not wanting to take any chances, before I pressed the return key to actually enter the command, I checked the fridge to be sure that there was some Swiss cheese around. I didn’t want to be hit with another termination.

As it turned out, all I could type into the line allotted this time was Swiss cheese salad red. You guessed it–when I entered the command into the computer, the program terminated me once more.•

Every time I think that dreams are too outré and our predictions too aggressive, I remind myself of “The Executive Computer,” a 1985 New York Times article by Erik Sandberg-Diment which asserted that laptops were limited in appeal, that “the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets.” The opening:

“WHATEVER happened to the laptop computer? Two years ago, on my flight to Las Vegas for Comdex, the annual microcomputer trade show, every second or third passenger pulled out a portable, ostensibly to work, but more likely to demonstrate an ability to keep up with the latest fad. Last year, only a couple of these computers could be seen on the fold-down trays. This year, every one of them had been replaced by the more traditional mixed drink or beer.

Was the laptop dream an illusion, then? Or was the problem merely that the right combination of features for such lightweight computers had not yet materialized? The answer probably is a combination of both views. For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few.

The limitations come from what people actually do with computers, as opposed to what the marketers expect them to do. On the whole, people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper. Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so.”