AMANA, Iowa (AP) -- Eleanor Vavricek remembers the day she came home from work and laid her eyes on the brand new, boxy-looking contraption on her kitchen counter. "I thought, `What is that? What in the world do I do with that?''' Cook. Like never before. The newfangled gift from her husband made Vavricek one of the first proud owners of the Amana Radarange microwave oven, which made its debut in American kitchens 30 years ago this month. "It made my life a lot easier -- and simpler,'' says Vavricek, a restaurant worker at the time.

Many still feel that way. Americans rank the microwave oven as the No. 1 technology that makes their lives better, according to a survey last year by Yankelovich Partners. That puts the microwave ahead of the telephone answering machine and the automatic teller machine, which ranked second and third.

Robert Thompson, an associate professor at Syracuse University and a former vice president of the Popular Culture Association, names television and microwave ovens as the two inventions since the middle of the century that most radically altered the American home. Yet Amana officials were nervous about introducing the new microwave technology in 1967. Even in an age of astronauts and TV dinners, they didn't think the unusual product stood a chance without the proper preparation. The company spent a year educating wholesalers and retailers, then launched the Radarange with a nationwide media blitz that kicked off in Chicago. Amana invited reporters and homemakers to homes in the city's suburbs while Amana hosts served coffee, reheated meals and made popcorn. The company even hired home economists who made house-calls to help first-time buyers install the contraption and cook the family's first microwave meal. Those home economists, all women, were on call 24 hours for each client for the first year of the launch. A serviceman was also on call and guaranteed to arrive within one hour for any trouble calls. Lyle Bischof remembers those days, especially the cooking demonstrations every Saturday morning at the Amana General Store, where he worked. "It was a situation where you had to explain to customers because they didn't know much about it.

They'd say, `Gosh, what is it going to do?''' says Bischof, who today is the appliance manager at the store. "We'd put a potato in there and show them, like four minutes for a potato, or a bowl of soup in a minute and a half,'' he recalls. "A lot of people at that time, both the husband and wife were working. It was such a time saver and such a convenience.'' The Radarange, which retailed for dlrs 495, weighed 91 pounds (41 kilograms) and was about 15 inches (33 centimeters) tall. It was powered by a 115-volt current, had 650 watts of cooking power and featured two control knobs, one for cooking food in five minutes or less and the other for longer times. "It didn't take me very long to get it figured out. It was pretty simple,'' said Vavricek, 78, who won Amana's "Oldest Microwave Contest'' this past spring. She won a brand new model that replaced the one that her husband, Frank, had bought for her in 1967. Her new Amana has 1,000 watts of cooking power, electronic controls with pre-programmed touch pads, cooks food in half the time of the original model and costs half the price. The number of American households with microwaves has grown, from about 10 percent in 1977 to nearly 90 percent today, said Dixie Trout, an Amana spokeswoman. The microwave boom resulted from a number of factors. Competitors entered the marketplace, beginning with Litton in 1969. And the size and price of microwaves decreased while the number of features increased. Even with the popularity of microwaves, Trout says it didn't do what many Amana engineers had envisioned -- replace the oven.

Nevertheless, Thompson believes that the microwave oven is one of the few inventions that lived up to "the kind of wide-eyed utopian promises of technology.''