The first home computer? Not what you might think…

If you ask any computer enthusiast when did home computing start, most would say late seventies to early eighties, when the costs and capabilities of hardware started to make it all possible.

And in many ways, they would be right, but there was one fabulous outlier from all this – the Honeywell Kitchen Computer, launched in 1969.

The Honeywell Kitchen Computer was the brainchild of the upmarket Nieman Marcus department store, looking for extravagant gifts for their 1969 Christmas Catalogue. Based on the Honeywell 316 business computer, it retailed at $10,000, or $88,000 dollars at 2025 prices. What could it do for $88,000? Well, it could store recipes and suggest meal menus based around your choice of entree.

Although even that wasn’t simple. The retail price included a two-week course on computer programming, as the user had to communicate with the computer by entering binary data as a string of ones and zeros, after which the computer would reply with a series of flashing lights, which had to be decoded back into binary and then back into English. The computer also weighed over 45K and took up a considerable amount of kitchen space.

The Honeywell Kitchen Computer didn’t really fly off the shelves, in fact not a single one was sold – and we love it for this alone.

In truth, it was probably a kind of fantasy gift designed as much for publicity as practicality, and we do rather like the sleek red, black and white pedestal design. And it was the first example of a computer being offered as a consumer product – or home computer.