DOUGLASCAIN

For a mere $10,600 in 1969 (the price of a modest home at that time) , one could lug home this beauteous white elephant. The Honeywell Kitchen Computer could store recipes in binary code for the most elite of housewives. It could also tell you what you could make based upon the ingredients you had on hand. It also featured a large protruding cutting board. How useful for a computer! Data was input using a series of switches on the front panel, and data was interpreted by the user from a small row of lights. That's right... And to really learn how to use it, the purchase price included 2 weeks of programing lessons. Again... how useful!

But seriously, if anyone is thinking "Hmmm, Douglas could really use a new addition to the Zughaus kitchen..." I would happily accept.

"It was totally configurable in software and we had 16 stage envelope generators for both frequency and amplitude, so it was kind of like the grandfather of the Yamaha DX7. On ours, you could build your own algorithms, using any of all of the 64 oscillators in any position in the algorithm. If you wanted additive, you could add 16 of them together. The phase modulation was similar to what Casio did with their CZ series. You could designate any tuning you wanted and save it. You could split the keyboard, stack sounds, model different parts of the keyboard for different parts of the sound, and save that as an entity - the kind of things that are common now." The ADS 200 featured "Additive synthesis, phase modulation, frequency modulation, nested phase and frequency modulation, and combinations of all modes." says inventor Tim Ryan.


...and only two were ever made. Whoever is lucky enough to have the opportunity to touch this fascinating piece of electronic music history is very lucky.