Now that digital devices have thoroughly insinuated themselves into all aspects of our private lives — from dating apps to remote-control vibrators to daycare updates — it’s quaint to realize how awkwardly computers first tiptoed into our homes.
In a 1980 piece of software described by Reem Hilu in The Intimate Life of Computers, two members of a sexually active pair would take turns at a keyboard answering a series of questions about their mood and proclivities. The computer would then refer the couple to one of the “interludes” described in an accompanying printed manual. Was it a night to curl up alone with a novel, or to be bent over the bathroom vanity and ravished from behind? Only you and your Apple II could say.
Hilu’s new book chronicles the various ways that software and hardware (heh heh) developers positioned their products as having the potential to enhance family life. Computers could help singles learn how to flirt effectively, then dictate a suitable copulation scenario for the successful match. The resulting kid could bond with Dad over a robot assembly kit, or chat with a microprocessor-enhanced talking doll.
Hilu acknowledges that not all these products were big sellers, which may be why even those of us who remember the ’80s never heard about a program called “IntraCourse,” or visited a home where a robot was helping with meal prep. Still, it’s a fascinating corner of technology history, with ripple effects seen to this day.
One of the book’s revelations is just how hard the ’80s went with rapidly advancing computer technology. Robots that could negotiate obstacles, interact through spoken language, and serve as burglar alarms weren’t just the stuff of science fiction: they were actually manufactured and marketed.
Talking dolls were so ambitious in the Reagan era, Hilu’s readers might well be left wondering why M3GAN is little nearer to reality today than C-3PO was when he debuted on movie screens. That’s a subject for another study, though, since Hilu, a scholar of film and media studies, keeps this book’s scope tightly focused on the ways a handful of consumer products were marketed and discussed in the industry press.
The paucity of information about how these products were actually developed, let alone how they were used by real families, is consistent with a cultural-studies frame, but leaves odd lacunae.
For example, when describing the talking doll Julie’s penchant for turning itself off when abandoned, Hilu is left to inconclusively hypothesize, “it is likely this was designed to prolong Julie’s battery life.” Similarly, Hilu can only imagine what an actual child might make of one particularly “garrulous” doll: “Jill’s nonstop talk had the strong potential to overpower users.”
In Hilu’s account, these products were decidedly of their time. In making a case for a computer’s place not only in the home but in the bedroom, manufacturers and marketers were negotiating a changing family dynamic that critiqued, however gently, traditional models of masculinity.
The Intimate Life of Computers extends, for example, an already surprisingly robust literature on the exegesis of the 1987 game Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. Hilu finds the concept of a “cringe” aesthetic — documented not only on TikTok but in the scholarly journal Television and New Media — useful for explaining how Larry winks at users’ perceptions of the title character’s outdated swinging machismo.
Beyond sparking questions about how the more expansive aspirations of ’80s computer hardware were collapsed into smartphones and talking Dots, The Intimate Life of Computers reminds readers that digital products are delivered by developers who are both advancing technology and playing amateur anthropologist, trying to anticipate what exactly we want from our devices.
In a coda, Hilu describes a recent ad for Amazon’s Astro home robot that, at least superficially, marks progress from the narrow scope of families depicted in consumer electronics ads four decades ago. Astro brings its owner a beer, “only this time she is a Black woman, not one of the endless parade of white men from 1980s robot ads.” In the ad’s kicker, though, the woman’s husband appears, revealing that he — still, he — is really the one who wants a robot.
In light of computers’ spotty track record advancing equality in our private lives, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that proliferating digital devices have reified cultural boundaries and contributed to our country’s perilous polarization. Even the voluble Jill, if put to it, couldn’t talk men into voting for a woman rather than for Leisure Suit Larry.
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