My daughter gave me an authentic hardcopy of Life Magazine of December 12, 1969, featuring the Apollo 12 Moon Landing on the cover. Under the Parting Shots section at the end, the magazine gives suggestions for Christmas presents to the discriminating shopper.
[click to enlarge] – Source Life Magazine of December 12, 1969
Honeywell kitchen computer. For menus, budgets and other household calculations. With a two-week course in programming. $10,600. — Neiman-Marcus
What was I thinking back in 1969? I didn’t buy a machine that spewed reams of tractor-feed paper all over my kitchen, helping me solve these pesky menu and budget problems in my kitchen.
Estimates are that a dollar in 1969 would have the buying power of six dollars today. That kitchen computer would have set me back about $65,000 of today’s purchasing power, about the price of a luxury automobile, the down-payment to a very nice house, or a hell of a vacation.
Neiman Marcus didn’t actually sell a single one of these machines, even though one existed. It’s in a museum now.
According to Wikipedia, it had about 4,000 to 32,000 bytes of memory. That would be enough to store about 1/200th of a single average digital photograph that we take with our iPhones every day.
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