Which of the following items was owned by the fewest U.S. homes in 1990? (51)

In 1850, Joel Houghton patented a wooden machine with a hand-turned wheel that splashed water on dishes, it was hardly a workable machine, but it was the first patent. In 1886, Josephine Cochran proclaims in disgust "If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I'll do it myself." And she did, Josephine Cochran invented the first practical (did the job) dishwasher. Josephine Cochran had expected the public to welcome the new invention, which she unveiled at the 1893, World's Fair, but only the hotels and large restaurants were buying her ideas. It was not until the 1950s, that dishwashers caught on with the general public. Josephine Cochran's machine was a hand-operated mechanical dishwasher. She founded a company to manufacture these dish washers, which eventually became KitchenAid.

so I guess it wasn't the dishwasher.....

for me too - any excuse to skip work

You got that right(see Dragos post) but interesting info and yea Josephine!!!

All this was predicted to be commonplace sometime before the end of the decade, but by 1987 the predicted revolution was said to be "in shambles", with only 15% of American homes owning a computer.

Virtually every aspect that was foreseen would be delayed to later years or would be entirely surpassed by later technological developments. The home computers of the early 1980s could not multitask. Even if they could, other technical limitations predominated; memory capacities were too small to hold entire encyclopedias or databases of financial records; floppy disk-based storage was inadequate in both capacity and speed for multimedia work; and the home computers' graphics chips could only display blocky, unrealistic images and blurry, jagged text that would be difficult to read a newspaper from. Although CD-ROM technology was introduced in 1985 with much promise for their future use, the drives were prohibitively expensive and only interfaced with IBM PCs and compatibles.


so it wasn't maybe home computers...

like Chat says we can work in groups and knock out 50 votes before you know it.... does anyone know how to override the "one vote only" formula in these polls?

Now you... - btw - is that from Star Wars? I voted Star Trek in the Star Trek v. Star Wars poll(but I've never seen Star Wars)

WHAAAAAT! never seen Star Wars???!!! we got to have a star wars marathon in TEXAS

Great idea!! And the more the merrier(if Dragos didn't already get it)
As for how to override the "one vote".... Conrad would know if anyone would... hey, sir, Conrad - is this possible(and if so, without us getting in trouble? )