Pizza Hut’s First Website | Hacker News Reader

Pizza Hut’s First Website

pizzahut.com

246 pointsfor_i_in_range151 comments

This is not strictly Pizza Hut's first website.

Pizza Hut's first website was built in 1994 [1]. This webpage has Javascript (1995) [2] running Google Tag Manager (2012) [3]. The article about Pizza Hut's first website [1] provides more context than just the webpage.

[1]: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/pizzanet/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#History

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Advert...

Amusingly, the date on this article and the fact it still loads today.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-08-25-fi-31168-...

Wow, very prescient amazing article!

Quote near beginning to put things in context of where we were back in 1994 :

“ To participate in the pilot, hungry Santa Cruzers need computers with Internet access and a version of an Internet interface program called Mosaic.”

But other interesting predictions:

“Instead of simply letting people order a pizza, why not let them design it as well? Instead of showing an ordinary menu with a list of toppings, show a picture of a pizza with the toppings clustered on the side.”

And then : “Why not customized T-shirts? Log on to the Internet and browse through assorted logos and designs. Mix, match and modify them to suit your interest. Then superimpose them onto the virtual T-shirt on the screen. Hit the right key and within 48 hours your new shirt is Fed-Exed to the desired address.

Of course, this network designability concept easily extends to bouquets of flowers, boxes of chocolates, fruit baskets and the $6.85-billion annual market in mail-order clothes shopping. It would be perfect for all kinds of gift giving.”

And yet it gets it so wrong too, far more value is in delivering standard pizzas and standard T-shirts than custom pizzas and t-shirts.

It thinks that just offering a cart is a waste of the internet's potential rather than worth the billions that it is.

You may be correct in that the bulk of the market is in standard pizza & t-shirts, but the internet/computers didn't create that market.

The article was pointing out what ordering over the internet with computers can potentially add to the ordering experience. Using the "web" in the same way one might have used a fax machine isn't particularly interesting then or now.

The article made largely accurate predictions of the future (now-present), except for one fatal assumption:

"Surely, a lot of those people would be prepared to pay a little premium to custom-design their own pizza [with the visual pizza builder online]."

No, users will NOT pay extra to custom design a pizza online. They will simply expect it.

The code name for Netscape was Mozilla, the ‘Mosaic killer’

Holy crap, I never knew where Mozilla came from.

(obligatory xkcd-everyone-knows goes here)

I mean it should be around 10,000 today that are learning about the xkcd for the first time: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Fun fact: Googling "mosaic" today returns a page full of results about art. Even if you search for "mosaic software", you get a bunch of software for creating mosaics. If you want to read about Mosaic today, you need to already know that it's a browser.

You can also find it if you know its full name, "NCSA Mosaic".

My first Internet browsing experience was on Netscape Navigator in 1996. Even back then I wouldn't have known about Mosaic, which pretty much was Netscape.

Whoever does this for Mongolian BBQ delivery will be the next Bill Gates.

It's interesting that the article suggests that making a phone call would be preferable to ordering online. There's been quite a culture change since then; I'll do anything to avoid having to make a phone call.

And yet there was a thread recently where numerous commenters rolled their eyes at the need for accessibility for the blind on the web, because “Can’t you just call?”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21188594

For even more irony, Pizza Hut’s and Domino’s pages from the mid-90s are more blind-accessible than the meth-addled versions of today. We’ve somehow regressed.

>Pizza Hut’s and Domino’s pages from the mid-90s are more blind-accessible than the meth-addled versions of today. We’ve somehow regressed.

Google wasn't dictating how websites are developed/optimized back then.

Sure, blame Google instead of lazy developers who can't be bothered to give a damn about anyone's time but their own.

Its funny when I type "Pizza" into Google, the first organic result is Pizzahut.com, not bad for a bunch of lazy developers who don't take Google SEO into account.

Except that Google now likes simplistic 1995-style websites. They're fast to load and don't obscure the relevant information.

Ordering pizza might be one of the few things that is better to do over the phone than online. It's far quicker to say "Pickup, a large pizza, half pepperoni, well done", than to fight through the combobox salad of seemingly every pizzeria online ordering system.

I disagree, but only because that order will get turned into a large pizza with all pepperoni pretty regularly. Modifiers get lost on phone orders very regularly.

Modifiers get lost on online orders very regularly, too, as I've learned from the sheer number of Uber Eats orders I've placed where my request for "no bun" or "no bread" gets ignored.

"Can you read my order back to me?"

Not that hard.

Or I could just order online and make sure it is right the first time?

Also, there is no way I'd just call in and say "Pickup, a large pizza, half pepperoni, well done" because that just seems incredibly rude so calling would take even more time. Much easier to load the website/app and enter your pizza

Aren't all of you glad that you can order on the web or by phone, as you prefer?

Aren't all of you glad that you can use Vim or Emacs, as you prefer?

Aren't you all glad that you can shave your yak in a bike shed painted exactly the way you prefer?

Yes but this conversation was about how preferences have changed or not changed

Every pizza joint around me has better deals when calling in.

I can't imagine you've ever called a pizza place. It's a business transaction, there's no pleasantries on either side. It's not rude. They want to move on with the business as quick as you want to hang up.

Maybe it's just a North East thing but my calls for pizza are about 10 seconds long and I've never thought "Gino is being rude, he didn't ask me how I was doing"

Pizza orders can be even faster than that. For me it's often: "Hey dude, same thing?" "Yep." "Cash?" "Yep."

Literally two words from me. A perk of being a regular customer perhaps, but honestly I order pizza maybe two times a month, not that much imho.

"Hello, Pizza Hut, can you hold? <music begins playing>"

I'm not at all sure my local pizza place even has online ordering. But it's literally a matter of maybe 30 seconds to place an order on the phone.

I suppose there are some advantages to having all your account info already stored if you're getting a delivery but that's not an option for me.

Eh, at least the 2 local pizzerias that I order from can both locate my account from a phone number, so if I call & say I've ordered before they just need to confirm the address. One of them does have online-ordering; and while the page is decent I still find it faster to call.

Haven't ordered from Pizza-Hut online, but ordering online from Dominos was absolute hell. There is no way to view your total without clicking through to checkout, and prices aren't listed. So the only way to find out what a specialty pizza costs is to add it to the cart, dismiss all the upsell popups about adding dessert and a soda, then view the cart.

Plus, even on a desktop computer with a decent connection it loads so much crap. The page ends up being heavier than Youtube, and I fail to see why I need to load as much resources to order a pizza vs. watch streaming video. Not worth it, especially as their pizza is neither particularly good or particularly cheap.

well, it seems like if the system is tracking you, then it should only be hard the first time. then it should default to your known preferences. unless you order a different pizza every time...

Preferences aside, a phone call is much more practical.

Via web..

* Ordering could easily fuck up somehow. Eg. Send multiple identical pizzas cus you pressed the button multiple times, cus the 1st time u pressed it nothing happened. I read about this actually happening recently.

* You dont get confirmation from a human.

* You cant ask questions and get answers from a human.

* You could only order what the app allows and nothing else.

* You'll probably need to register / login, forget your password, reset it, etc. etc. It will take a lot longer.

The big problem with customer service nowadays is thats it's impossible to get hold of a human you can tell your problem to, and who will hopefully deal with it (eg. google)

I used to work for Domino's. I also often order pizza.

In both roles, online ordering was worlds better than a phone call.

As a Domino's employee, it was a lot easier and faster to get an order from the online system. It was often more accurate too. We didn't have to ask the drunk customer to repeat their order multiple times, then have them rage at us when we delivered what they ordered, only to find out it was not what they thought they were ordering.

As a customer, it's faster and more efficient to order online. I can save a custom order and have my really weird Frankenstein pizza ordered at the click of a button. Also, payment online is far easier and more reassuring than handing over credit card details on the phone (and don't get me started on cash).

> * Ordering could easily fuck up somehow. Eg. Send multiple identical pizzas cus you pressed the button multiple times, cus the 1st time u pressed it nothing happened. I read about this actually happening recently.

I don't think I've ever had an online order experience any of those problems. On the other hand, I've had countless phone/human interactions that have led to order screwups, usually misspellings of my name/email/phone number despite my spelling it out for the person.

Otoh spelling out my name and address and phone number and card details over the phone and making sure there's no mistakes takes minutes whereas I can type it all in and make sure it's correct in 30 seconds

Or save your card information. Or your past orders!

Ordering pizza online takes me less than a minute. If I called I'd still be on hold

Amazing. I love that the article mentions Snow Crash too.

Me too, although it bugs me that he says Snow Crash "describes a future where Americans excel at only two things: writing software and delivering pizza in less than 30 minutes".

The book clearly states that Americans excel at four things:

music

movies

microcode (software)

high-speed pizza delivery

> Amusingly, the date on this article and the fact it still loads today.

I expect it was more recently put online from the archives, but retaining its date of authorship (as it should) rather than being originally published online in 1994 and remaining there since.

great article! It's not mentioned there, but I think the "conventional phone lines" meant fax, which was a pretty common gateway from the internet at the time. One of the McCools (can't remember if it was Rob or Mike) had a new-fangled CGI script that enabled a HTML form to order Jimmy Johns sandwich and it used UIUCs email-to-fax gateway to fax the local shop. Good times.

"It’s the Geek Chic way to nosh."

At my university, someone did a demo of what ordering a pizza would look like online, using Pizza Hut's site as an example, sometime in 1994-95.

I remember thinking to myself that was a ridiculous idea, because all of the stores would have to be wired up to the Internet, and who would do that?

That ignored, of course, the possibility that a central location could take the orders and communicate them to the individual stores (which is how it worked for phone ordering at one point, maybe even today), and I completely whiffed on the future ubiquity of the Internet.

You could have made a fortune betting against my computer prognostications in the 90s.

> That ignored, of course, the possibility that a central location could take the orders and communicate them to the individual stores (which is how it worked for phone ordering at one point, maybe even today)

Wait, really? I worked in several pizza restaurants around the early 2000s and we always took the phone calls directly. It was very common to get questions about stuff like directions and opening hours, or weird special requests, which I can't imagine working very well with a remote call center setup. I don't want to doubt your claim, I'm just surprised to hear it.

It's actually true of Pizza Hut right now. I had to call in an order because the online form didn't have the option I wanted, and the operator on the other end definitely wasn't even in the same state I was.

I agree though, it was very surprising.

The sad part of my failed prognostication was that I had worked as a Pizza Hut delivery driver a few years previously and that’s exactly what they did.

People called a central dispatch and we received printouts of the orders. We would call the office to let them know our current projected delivery times, but other questions they could already answer.

Most people don't see the future coming. That's why we're so amazed at the people who do (and they make a killing doing so).

When they revealed the iPad I was in an industrial design class in college and we relentlessly mocked it, sure that it would be a flop.

> You could have made a fortune betting against my computer prognostications in the 90s.

See, this is something you have in common with the people who get paid to commentate on this stuff as though they knew anything about anything.

If it weren't for the fact that you've just been honest about your less than perfect prediction record, I'd suggest a career move! :)

Can't find the source, but I remember reading an author from the 60s who predicted the internet, but also predicted you'd treat it like a catalog and still have to call in and read off the product numbers you wanted to order and communicate them to a human operator -- even for someone who could predict the internet, it still seemed like a leap to suggest that even the order itself could be processed over that same network!

I got a 403 forbidden message, but archive.org works.

* https://web.archive.org/web/20140123215657/https://www.pizza...

> PizzaNet is Pizza Hut's Electronic Storefront and is brought to you by Pizza Hut® and The Santa Cruz Operation®

What, the original SCO, THE Unix company, built the website for Pizza Hut? The original SCO dissolved in 2001, so it must be earlier?

The Web was a huge driver of Unix adoption. Before the Web came along, Unix was on the ropes. The conventional wisdom was that Windows NT would eventually finish it off, owning the server space the way regular Windows owned the desktop. But all the early tools for standing up a Web site were Unix-centric, simply because the Web's roots were in science and academia rather than traditional corporate computing. So when the Web started getting big, Unix started getting big too, and never really stopped.

Presumably someone at SCO thought an online pizza ordering service would be a good way to demonstrate the value a Web site could have for businesses. And that demand for Web sites would in turn mean demand for SCO's Unix products.

But the web-scale demand for SCO Unix never really materialized. Linux took much of the marketshare while SCO went after IBM https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/02/ibm_vs_sco_revives/

That wasn't the same SCO, the SCO that sued IBM was the Linux vendor Caldera who purchased SCO's assets and renamed themselves as such.

Yes, the original SCO was "good". It was Caldera Systems's CEO who started the lawsuits, suing everyone, they even sued Novell for the Unix trademark, and obviously got a notorious reputation and turned SCO into a dirty world. And of course, it almost lost all cases and his company became an utter piece of garbage.

Seriously, what was the CEO thinking about?! I guess Caldera Systems purchased SCO, thought it was a good deal, but they suddenly found the days of commercial proprietary Unix were ending and the purchase was a mistake, and this is how they started its assaults.

I would have bet for Windows NT (Network) but it was (« New technology »)

src : wikipedia (donate if you can!)

Based on the fact that the site is monochrome and about 8KB, I'm going to guess early 90s.

It's funny, the favico (modern asset loaded from the root of the domain automatically) outweighs the entire page by a factor of 4.

There is no favico for this site here.

Edit: weirdly, it loads one now.

I'm not 100% sure if it was SCO, but Pizza Hut restaurants ran some flavor of UNIX in the stores in the early 90's.

On our local BBS list, there was one named Pizza Hut and it was just a UNIX login. We'd dial in and try a few passwords then get booted.

One day I was at a restaurant with my parents, and sure enough, there was a terminal behind the counter with that same login prompt! I figure some employee must have leaked the phone number or someone found it wardialing.

> On our local BBS list, there was one named Pizza Hut and it was just a UNIX login. One day I was at a restaurant with my parents, and sure enough, there was a terminal behind the counter with that same login prompt!

> someone found it wardialing.

Aha! It was the amazing days, you just dial a bunch of numbers in your area, and you get all sorts of exposed mainframes and servers from various organizations on the phone line. It was the origin of the common hacker trope.

Today, computers are ubiquitous, but most of them are embedded devices, IoT, smartphones or PCs, you can never find a mainframe in the wild again, the green-blinking CRT terminals from the 80s and the impression of "hack everything" is long gone,

Taco Bell restaurants had SCO boxes in the early 90's, too. There was one in my local area that somebody found, presumably wardialing.

archive.org has that main page archived as far back as December 1996:

https://web.archive.org/web/19961219205128/http://www.pizzah...

There's a gorgeous HTML comment in there, referring to a 1994 creation date

    ****************************************************************************
    *                                                                          *
    *                            PIZZA HUT INC.                                *
    *                                                                          *
    *       PHI proprietary information: the enclosed materials contain        *
    *       proprietary information of Pizza Hut Inc. and shall                *
    *       not be disclosed in whole or in any part to any third party        *
    *       or used by any person for any purpose, without written consent     *
    *       of PHI. Duplication of any portion of these materials shall        *
    *       include this legend.                                               *
    *                                                                          *
    ****************************************************************************
    **
    ** HTML index.html
    **
    ** DESCRIPTION Home Page.
    **
    ** REVISIONS
    ** Date  Who  Comments
    ** ----  ---  --------
    ** 08/18/94 SCO  created.
    **

"Shall not be disclosed to anyone" on a public facing web page. It took a long time to train people out of that one. Remember email signature disclaimers? Still some of those around.

Let's collect all the internet's historical pizza moments. I've collected a few from the comments here and added a few.

- 1990, Don Hopkins uses the PizzaTool to fax a pizza order.

- 1992, Snow Crash is published. Readers imagine interconnected virtual worlds and action packed pizza delivery. Often quoted book in regards to internet, MMORPGs and pizza.

- 1994, Pizza Hut's Pizza Net allows users in Santa Cruz to order pizza.

- May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz buys two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins (valued at around 30 USD at the time).

2005, Everquest adds /pizza to begin the pizza ordering process from in-game http://www.nbcnews.com/id/7020132/ns/technology_and_science-...

> May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz buys two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins (valued at around 30 USD at the time).

10,000 BTC = 63,317,800 GBP or 82,204,100 USD as of 2019-10-21 at 16:00 UTC

A lot of pizza these days.

And bitcoin is very far from its historical max

I wonder if Pizza Hut still owns those 10k BTC they bought for the price of two pizzas?

If I remember correctly he traded the BTC to another user who then put the pizzas on his credit card

And it was Papa Johns, not Pizza Hut.

IIRC, the transaction was between two people; Pizza Hut didn't touch any Bitcoin.

2004, a perl script pizza_party is published allowing to buy pizza from the command line. I think it was even in some distros' package managers for a while.

Slashdot discussion: https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/04/05/07/138238/piz...

Archive of project homepage: https://web.archive.org/web/20040508090713/http://www.beiger...

1999, i-Opener internet appliance released with pizza key on keyboard.

https://www.salon.com/2000/07/12/i_opener/

2 Photos: https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/28dfsj...

my favorite 'we charge $99 for $500 of hardware, and make it up in volume' .com scam

you can add the emergence of Lightning Network Pizza for your 2019 entry: https://ln.pizza

Redirects to the pizzahut.com.au main page for me.

Yeah, looks like regional redirect. For me redirects to .lv which returns SERVER NOT FOUND error. Probably should have been PIZZA NOT FOUND error or PIZZA UNDELIVERABLE.

FoRbIdDeN pIZzA

pizzahut.de for me with a broken back button so you can't leave again and have to close the tab...

Try long-pressing or right clicking the back button to get a menu of past locations. This used to be a visible and discoverabledrop down menu in most browsers but (insert rant about modern UI design here).

Thanks for the tip.

Redirects to pizzahut.co.za for me. I didn't even know there was a Pizza Hut in South Africa.

Redirects to pizzahut.ae for me which sucks because this page should be a corporate website not linked to a region.

Yep redirects to the .co.nz site for me.

pizzahut.fi for me

Indeed. Too bad it doesn't redirect to pizza.hut.fi

(which was a host at the Helsinki University of Technology, I think it was a Sun box).

I've got redirected to pizzahut.se

In Canada, it redirects to pizzahut.ca

With a bad cert, no less...

The bad cert is for https://pizzahut.ca/ but https://www.pizzahut.ca/ is fine.

The cert loaded on pizzahut.ca is for shortener.secureserver.net. The cert for www.pizzahut.ca is good for *.pizzahut.ca, but they're just not loading it for pizzahut.ca. :/

GoDaddy lol, why is PizzaHut using GoDaddy?

Easy solution, redirect to the proper fqdn (with www.) or request a multi domain certificate including both.

and a maple leaf in the logo, I'm sure

Every pizza comes w automatic pineapple...

pizzahut.fr for me. Could someone rehost thevpage somewhere else so people outside the US can see it?

In a way, I miss the naive old web. Now you get popups, requests to have your location, prompts to sign in before you can get deals, etc. In many ways a simple web form asking for pizza is a better user experience.

Imo, whatever annoying tradeoffs a commercialized web brought with it, it was wholly worth it for giving literally anybody the ability to learn anything they are curious about.

1080p Harvard compsci lectures[0] available for free would have been a pipe dream in 1995.

[0] https://youtu.be/e9Eds2Rc_x8

I agree It's pretty amazing what a resource the web has become, but I don't think it's all that clear what trade-offs have been made, and if the implications of those are just mere annoyances.

Well that was a weird 1 minute and 20 second intro.

I prefer the pizza website "requests to have [my] location" than asks me manually to input my zip code (not like you can't do the latter, anyway).

I had a similar thought when I landed on the site. On the other hand, some features/trends of modern websites could improve some aspects of our user experience. For instance, automatically getting my location could be sometimes useful. Makes me think where the optimal middle ground is.

When ready to order, I agree. However, when browsing for what's available, it's a frustrating experience. The last time I wanted to see prices from Papa Johns, I couldn't. They want you to sign in with your pizza profile, which I didn't have. Ok fine, enter your zip code, then pick delivery or pickup, then pick the store. Why do I need to do all of this to see prices? It more often than not just makes me skip it and move on to a competitor...

Because after all that typing you are already invested and its hard to let go all this work to waste, might as well just order and be done with it.

Hypnospace Outlaw came out this year, it's a game where you're basically an internet cop/mod in the early 90s. Pretty well done

"Y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software),

and high-speed pizza delivery."

—Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson

"2020 was the year that would decide between two pizza deliveries techniques. Amazon-Google drone-based delivery or the MIT's supersonic pizza railgun"

An hypersonic railgun could cook the pizza using air friction. Also, it would be faster.

But more expensive. However engineers estimate that an appropriate rail gun would have 10 times the range of an average drone so would cover a wider area.

In the future, we can make uncooked pizzas durable enough to survive that and still be edible.

Hmm, pretty brilliant point, to cook it during transport to be ready on arrival.

Apparently, the site automatically redirects me to the standard German site. Fantastic. My hate for the modern web continues to grow. You could replace the protagonists of I Have No Mouth with walking, talking websites and it'd roughly mirror what I'm feeling right now. The only way I could see what everybody was talking about was by checking out https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/pizzanet/ and the archive.org page which were linked by somebody else.

My father was head of marcom at SCO went this went live and my 8 year old self was one of the first people to use this site!

I thought I’d see a very old version, but I just see the current website... is that their first?!

Yeah, I'm getting redirected to the current website too. You can see the page archived here: http://archive.is/https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/h...

What I see is :

"Access Denied You don't have permission to access "http://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html" on this server. Reference #18.8a0a1602.1571725900.474a5bfd"

This could have been the old Pizza Hut web site, but I think this is just an error, maybe due to server load?

Pizzanet was started in August 1994, and was hosted at Pizza Hut Headquarters in Wichita, Kansas.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120609100313/http://www.intere...

By comparison, the current pizzahut.com home page makes 92 network requests, including 34 potential trackers according to Privacy Badger.

Looking at this old site, I see the future of the web. This navbar + hero + a bunch of marketing fluff that nobody reads.. it's grandma/grandpa shit. It's like those walmart photograph frames with teddy bears on them. It seems cool now, you can make six figures making this shit, but it's ridiculous.

Didn't know they had Google Analytics back then.

Came here to say that I bet that wasn't part of the original site!

Good tip to check the console.

While probably not really Pizza Hut's first web site, I think this goes a long way to show how a lot of the internet has actually regressed. We've gone from this simple form that just asks "Who wants pizza and where can we call you?" and, instead of going to "Who wants pizza and where should we bring it?", we went to ads and pop-ups and to a place where, arguably, the process is way more complicated than it needs to be.

Advertising kinda ruined the internet.

And ten years later they were innovating online again with "slash-pizza": https://money.cnn.com/2005/02/17/commentary/game_over/column...

The first time I saw anything on a computer related to pizza ordering was the Sun NeWS pizzatool:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...

A few years back their site wouldn't work with some adblocker options, I believe their js didn't handle the circumstances of if their geoip analytics was blocks.

I just emailed their support, gave them the details, and they fixed it and gave me a $20 card. Was a nice transaction.

What was the actual date on this? I assume it was wayyyy before 2014 haha.

Imagine telling them back then that someone could fill out all the details on the website, choose their pizza and customise toppings AND have it delivered by a robot.

They'd think you were high!

You could already select the toppings. Drone technology was not prevalent back then, but no one would think you were high. They were living the dot-com bubble. They would probably invest in that idea if anyone pitched it the right way.

If you actually pulled that off, you could be the lucky recipient of a $375 million investment from SoftBank!

https://www.google.com/search?q=softbank+zume+pizza

(Full disclosure: I tried the pizza. It was... not very good. Amici's next time!)

I remember it like that in 1994. I checked some old chat logs, and sure enough, it was “unchanged for 3 years” in 1997.

I remember the pizza ordering scene in The Net (1995) seemed very futuristic at the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUSqX7B5DXs

Ah, memories. The frustration was they wouldn’t deliver from CA to NY.

Fascinating to watch technology go from world-changing bleeding-edge to archeological discovery.

It is ... glorious!

   <BODY BGCOLOR=#d0d0d0 TEXT=#000000 LINK=#0000ff VLINK=#5500cc ALINK=#ff0000">

Requests too much PII! Run away!

Pizza Identifier Information

internet was a safe place!

The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet. (Oct 1990)

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...

I got redirected to the MX site

Wow, reminds me of the good ol' days of SCO Unix bashing.

Now THAT is a tech company!

I wonder if they will be forced to add a GDPR notice for an unlisted subpage :)

Oh they have Google Analytics and a link to a now-404-ed JS https://www.pizzahut.com/akam/11/6df12bd5 . It is like they tried to maintain/upgrade at some point.

Mozart's Ghost!

It loads so fast!

Who is The Santa Cruz Operation®?

SCO is synonymous with evil old school unix. A lot of mainframes ran it, and my first job was dealing with some old SCO/ATT bastardized system. Interestingly enough, I never bothered to know what SCO stood for until now.

> SCO is synonymous with evil old school unix.

The full name Santa Cruz Operation only refers to the original SCO company (which sold itself in 2001), not the SCO Group which purchased SCO and turned its name into a dirty word. Unlike the SCO Group, the original SCO was old-school commercial Unix, but it didn't have such a bad reputation. Quite a few hackers in the Unix world worked with the original SCO.

Thanks for the history, seriously interesting! My interaction was shortly after 2001, but on an ancient system. Guessing it had some parts from both histories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation

It's important to clarify that the SCO Group in the Linux disputes was not the original Santa Cruz Operation, Santa Cruz Operation sold all Unix business to Caldera Systems in 2001, and it was Caldera Systems's CEO who started a bunch of lawsuits, suing everyone, Red Hat, and various Linux users, they even sued Novell for the Unix trademark, and obviously got a notorious reputation and turned SCO into a dirty world. And of course, it almost lost all cases and turned SCO as a company into an utter piece of garbage.

Seriously, what was the CEO thinking about?! I guess Caldera Systems purchased SCO and they suddenly found the days of commercial proprietary Unix were ending and the purchase was a mistake, and this is how they started its assaults.

Unlike the SCO Group, the original SCO didn't have such a bad reputation. Quite a few hackers in the Unix world worked with the original SCO. Also it used to hold a Unix conference, speakers included Linus Torvalds.

Ah, the poetry of naming a company after a hole in the ground.

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