On-Line Pizza Idea Is Clever but Only Half-Baked (1994)
latimes.com
latimes.com
> 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. Let teen-agers and college students build their own pizzas on-screen. Present a palette of toppings and let people place their mushrooms and green peppers and pepperoni anywhere on the pizza they want. The real pizza is customized accordingly. In other words, computer-aided pizza engineering.
> This is precisely the sort of interactivity that computers and networks are good at.
> [...]
> 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.
Now I phone (yes, phone) the local hospital near the recipient and ask them what florist they use (often it's contracted to a mom-and-pop store down the street). Then I call (yes, call) that place on the phone and order.
I've never been disappointed this way.
If you really want to get a sense of how long ago that was, we coded the Dominos Pizza builder in both Flash and Javascript... because not all browsers had great Flash support.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...
"It’s a programming example for The NeWS Toolkit, and it tests out and shows how to use all the different widgets, dialogs, drag and drop, lightweight threading, and PostScript drawing."
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt
I even wrote a manual entry (it shipped with Solaris 2.0, so documentation was required):
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6.txt
I just posted more here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21383697
PizzaTool was written in Sun's "NeWS" dialect of PostScript (which James Gosling made after Emacs but before Java), which it has all kinds of extensions for multiple drawing surfaces (canvases), events, light weight threads, networking, object oriented programming, etc.
So for example PizzaTool would fork off a light weight thread to handle spinning the pizza, and another one to draw toppings, and the user interface had its own thread of course. So the user interface would not freeze up while it drew toppings and spun the pizza, all at the same time!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
>NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently:
> - used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.
> - used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering.
> - used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation.
At least it wasn't as bad as TCL/Tk's original default "Bisque" (aka "Ousterhour Beige" aka "Baby Diarrhea Gamut") color scheme. ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173197
https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/tk_bisque
The "bisque is beautiful" slogan first appeared on a T-shirt in 1995.
It had dynamically reconfiguring scrolling sub-panels of widgets inside of other dynamically reconfiguring scrolling panels of widgets, that would dynamically reconfigure, flicker, and repaint the screen madly, whenever you picked items from menus or just looked at it funny!
Just don't DARE to use XBugTool to report a bug against itself, as I foolishly tried to do once, after I teased its scrolling lists, and it got angry and froze my mouse, stole my input focus, and would not give it back. I was trapped in XBugTool and could not get out, so I wrote a desperate cry for help as Sun Bug ID #1059974.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/xbugto...
One thing I did keep a screen snapshot of was of how XCalc loses its shit after you resize it a bunch of times.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/XCalc....
They did the pizza tracker and consulted on the marketing and some design work (mostly for Dominos Canada) I don't think they did the pizza picker interface.
Great place to work, I only left because they were going through some growing pains in restructuring their eComm practice and some talented people got passed over. I was ready for a leadership role.
After you've assembled your pizza with the reverse claw machine, you need to direct a spatula under the pizza, and into an oven. When your pizza is done enough, you use the spatula again to drop it into a box. Then you get a box-claw machine which you use to place your fresh pizza-in-box onto a delivery drone. Make sure it's balanced! Finally, you're granted control of the delivery drone, which you can fly to your house.
What could possibly go wrong?
Get it right now! Cost: 400 Gems
I may be in the minority but I find this feature quite useful. As someone whose is a more visual learning person, having the ability to virtually see how my product will turn out makes it easier for me to make choices. Instead of thinking about if item X and Y go together, it gives me a better idea of how it may taste when I see them stacked on top of each other. I know X tastes like this, so seeing them next to each other, it may allow me to better think if tastes will work together.
We also can’t forget about people who may not be able to read properly. Instead of worrying what they’re ordering, they just make it look like what they want. (somewhat of an extreme case but possible)
So while I agree this small design is not a high priority for UX designers, I do think not having it would be somewhat of an accessibility barrier for some users.
That said, it seems like all of the Bank of America and TD Bank ATMs I use in Boston are starting to let you choose the bills you want on screen. Was recently in Montreal and had the same experience there too so I'm guessing that's what ATMs are trending towards.
Higher denominations are so rare that many businesses don't accept them.
Also, ATMs on casino floors in Vegas dispense $100s.
I've noticed a couple of banks in Canada where, if you ask the ATM for $100, it'll ask you if you want a single $100 bill, two $50 bills, or five $20 bills.
(Maybe Atlantic City, too. I can't remember...)
I think they have options for smaller bills, too.
(Also, note that 10 PLN is the smallest bill we have, below that we switch to coins - 5, 2 and 1 PLN. Our ATMs don't handle coins.)
I can't even draw less than 50€ on most of them because some banks apparently have a "minimum draw amount" for my card.
[edit] This was in Washington, DC.
If you pay online, you know if your payment cleared right away. With these GPRS card readers, you wouldn't know until the driver has arrived, and frequently the readers wouldn't work for one reason or another. Of course, if you wanted to pay by card, you usually didn't have cash either, so then the driver would have to phone their shop and ask what to do, and it was just a general hassle.
They've since been acquired by Dominos and offer online PayPal/credit card payment and it's much more convenient.
It also helps HQ stop under-the-table sales, or blocking the phone lines when they’re busy.
I think a place I use still has its orders print on that.
https://www.yelp.com/biz/tony-and-albas-pizza-and-pasta-moun...
Ben Stoltz's original DevGuide/XView/X11 version of PizzaTool and also my TNT/NeWS version both had pizza order optimizers, so if you put together a basic "Cheese" pizza with individual toppings clams, pepperoni, garlic, jalapenos, and bacon, it would optimize it to an "Ala Gilroy" with extra clams, which saved you money.
There was nothing special users had to do (or even know about) to optimize the order: You could just select a pre-configured style or basic "Cheese" from the style drop-down, then click on and off the checkboxes to toggle toppings, and it would automatically reselect the most efficient base pizza style in the style drop-down, to automatically minimize the price.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...
Date: Tue, 28 May 91 19:25:45 PDT From: Paul Simons To: UNIX Today Subject: Pizzatool 4/29/91
Editor UNIX Today:
We the following Sun engineers would like to make a historical clarification regarding the article entitled, “Any Way You Slice It, Sun’s Pizzatool Is Food For Thought” in the April 15 issue of UNIX Today. The original idea of ordering food from the workstation was conceived way back in 1989 by David LaValle who is now at NeXT. The original fully functional implementation of ordering food thru the workstation was “Pizzatool” developed by Ben Stoltz using Sun’s DevGuide. The features that were present in that original version included price optimization, pop-up preconfigured pizza menu, fully selectable ingredients, as well as the fax hook-in to fax an order to Tony and Alba’s. Fax capability courteousy of Ed Un. Don Hopkins subsequently reimplemented this original version of pizzatool in PostScript for the NeWS toolkit and added the WYSIWYG spinning popup pizza which provided a preview of the final cooked pizza.
This letter in no way represents the views, product plans, or announcements of Sun Microsystems and is only the opinions of the engineers who witnessed this historic event. :-)
Sean English, Dave Evans, Don Hopkins, Paul Simons, Ben Stoltz, Ed Un.
Any Way You Slice It, Sun's PizzaTool Is Food For Thought
https://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/Yucks/V1/msg00044.html
>And in yet another advancement for the free exchange of software, Sun is offering PizzaTool source without charge. [...]
>He said the PizzaTool even has a built-in cost-cutting feature that allows it to chec prices of the toppings you have selected, and try to build a cheaper pizza using a price list from your local pizza parlor. In its current incarnation, the PizzaTool will take an order and send it via E-mail to an address on the Pizza Server. At Sun, the server then sends a fax order to Tony and Alba's pizza place in Mountain View.
I could see this as some sort of cash-back arbitrage business, where the vendor charges a 5% premium, plus use a 3% cash-back card to cover any remainder of the processing/interchange fees.
Large 1-topping has 48 pepperoni Large 2-topping has 30 (from memory, many years ago)
So a double pepperoni pizza has 60, not 96 slices.
Like if a large has 48 pepperoni, but I get it with pepperoni and sausage, do I get 48x pepperoni + 48x sausage, 24x each, or something else?
On the other hand, these non-browser communications I'm referring to almost always use HTTP APIs (a.k.a. web services) these days, whereas in the past they would use raw sockets or whatever else, so you could argue that even these comprise the web.
Isn't this a Seinfeld episode.
"Yes, but why isn't it doing what I think it should be doing!?"
The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...
PostScript PizzaTool source code:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt
You could also drag and drop images into your pizza! Here's a video and transcript of a demo I gave at the Exploratorium (which explains all the kids screaming in the background).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avJnpDKHxPY&t=21m43s
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transc...
So this is PizzaTool and RasterRap, and these are written in The NeWS Toolkit, not HyperLook. But HyperLook is layered on top of The NeWS Toolkit, or sort of on top and in between The NeWS Toolkit. But this is pure TNT.
Now these are, umm. PizzaTool: I’ll do PizzaTool first.
PizzaTool lets you order pizzas with a GUI. And we can select which pizza parlor. Tony & Alba’s is the nice one in Mountain View. They support ordering pizzas via FAX.
Now you can write you name, and your phone, and all this, and you can have a “Take and Bake” or “Please Deliver”. You say Please Deliver: “They probably won’t deliver unless you make it worth their while by ordering lots of pizzas!” It gives you those “affordances”, I mean, ahem, right, I was trying to work that word in.
So ok, hit Toppings, you get this lovely topping dialog. And you can pop up a menu of common pizza styles, pinning it in the Open Look tradition. And, you know, it sets up the check boxes for you. And then you can add other toppings.
And then see, when you’ve added a bunch of things, it actually changes your category of pizza. I might get, like, it will flip to “Everything” pretty soon or something.
Well anyway, yeah, let’s do “Cheese”, and then if I were to add all these crazy things, it will realize that it can actually get a better deal by upgrading me to an “All Meat Combo” with 10 extra toppings.
It’s your little “pizza guide”, you know.
And once you’ve selected all your toppings, and how big you want your pizza, you hit “Preview”, so that you can make sure that this is the pizza you really want.
And then it just does this, makes a little window, see this is a neat window here. It’s cut out, so that your pizza is just floating within the frame.
And now, whoop, ok. And then you can add more toppings, and it forks off a lightweight PostScript to sprinkle toppings. And it’s totally object oriented, I swear.
Now that you have a preview, and you want to see what it’s like when you cook it, you can just use direct manipulation, and just sort of spin it around with the mouse, and then let it go.
That actually has a pretty good effect of cooking the toppings, because you get all this nice noise from the rotation, you know. It’s just… It’s all written in PostScript.
“Camera person is now laughing!”
(Camera lurches around violently!)
You know, and then you got your pizza right the way you want it, and then you can hit “Order”.
It goes “Do you really want to order a pizza from Tony & Alba’s? This will cost real money and make you want to drink beer!” Then you say “Yes!”
And then, you know, when you’re on the right network and everything, what it does, it faxes the order there, and… Oh! “Yer pizza is being held hostage until ya payz off yer tab, chump! Yer tab’s presently $1212.64.”
I guess Sun hasn’t been paying off my account since I left. Oh well…
Umm, yes, right. So, now, this has, PizzaTool has some other useful features. You can, go into pizza authoring mode, and edit your pizza toppings.
Or, you know, say you have a favorite kind of pizza, you can just make a new style, “Don’s Fave”, and save, and say, “New Style”. It just adds it there, dynamically updates, so — this is basically a test that I made for the — you know, and it copies its state onto — you know, so, this is a test I made for the toolkit that used every bit of the toolkit that’s possible, and is as dynamic as it could be.
Anyway, the other thing we had to test was drag and drop.
Now there’s this other program here, it’s RasterRap, and it allows you to drag this image and drop it into that, or you can drag it from here and drop it into the other. So these guys will talk to each other through drag and drop, and give you the lovely feedback.
And then you can also — PizzaTool also supports drag and drop. So BLOOP! You can put a little Mona Lisa in your pizza, and then spin her, and put some bell peppers down, and maybe some turkey.
(Camera person laughs and shakes camera.)
This is all in the name of progress! Ha ha ha!
(Confused muttering in the background!)
Oh, and if you make the pizza small, it goes really fast!
So once you’re done doing all this crazy stuff, you can wash it out.
By, see, we have this nice beautiful painting of a wave here, put the wave in there, and go whooooosh.
What’s really neat is when you make it spin really fast, really really fast — we’ll put the butterfly in for that for that — you go BOOM! Well now, that’s not fast. Boom.
Yeah, ok. Ahh, oh yeah, you get these really great —I can’t really explain it very easily, but let’s add some artichoke hearts. (chuckle)
Yeah, so, yeah, mathematical imprecision, or something like that.
This is just sort of a food processor.
I left it spinning over Christmas to see what happens and it was really a mess when I came back.
Ok, well any way, that’s just what PizzaTool does.
Back around 1998 we built a custom product selector for a popular knife manufacturer which basically did that: you had choices for three components – base, blade, and handle — and a couple other options, but unlike something like Google Maps the list of possible images to load and all of their metadata easily fit in memory and they didn’t take terribly long to download so you could have a nice interactive visual display which was basically a form with a few selects and checkboxes.
Similarly, yes, we used dialup back then but we also were using small images with much less color depth and people were more accustomed to pages taking longer to load. Some optimized images could easily have made a basic pizza designer possible in that era - probably with cartoonish 16-color GIF graphics but a good designer could do a surprising amount with a little creativity.
If I only got the option to "design" the pizza visually you better hope that the pizza is best in class. Because that seriously sounds pretty miserable, even in 2019 and I can't imagine it being done well in the near future either.
They both read it and as the hype dies down ideally they stand the test of time and are equally as insightful or visionary like.
It gets me the support and attention I aim for though. Like being a goto for advisory or an expert in a trial.
with all this data its just a matter of time they offer they own kitchens that create 20% of the products that fullfil 80% of the market need for 60% of the market price.
wonder why no delivery company has done this yet?
I worked for them for a few weeks in London as a way to get paid to work out. There was a sort of container warehouse in Battersea - basically food trucks that you're ordering from.
You might also appreciate this:
> I Sold Microwave Meals On Deliveroo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k47u9tduwb8
When I had a look a few years back basically everywhere looked the same with stock professional photos. You wouldn't know that your fancy-looking Indian came from a grimy backstreet shop or container or whatever else.
But again, you say you’re not in the market for 20 quid takeaways - then how much are you willing to pay for food?
That’s how much it costs to eat in London unless you’re going for cheapish fried chicken or a really bad pizza.
I generally reserve eating out for when I'm on the go or want to have a night out with friends. It's very rare that I buy takeaway food to eat at home. One of the best parts about being at home is having a kitchen.
Decent quality prepared food is expensive in a ton of places, this isn't an exclusively London thing by any stretch of the imagination.
Cooking is one of the pleasures of life, it ain't all about the grind.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/14/doordash-kitchens/
[2]: https://www.eater.com/2017/10/31/16580814/doordash-kitchens-...
[3]: https://www.eater.com/2018/10/24/18018334/uber-eats-virtual-...
[4]: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/entertainment/restaurants-and-b...
As far as I can tell, none of the apps are marking up menu item prices for pickup today the way they do for delivery. I hope that keeps up.
But my buddy just started college at the University of Oregon. They had a computing center that was this tiny little store that was on the second floor above all the big rack-mounted computers. I thought it was beautiful. I still love seeing walls of servers.
But Apple used to give massive discounts to University students. I was not one, but my friend was. So I gave him $1,400 in cash for a Performa 6214, a Apple Multiple Scan 14 Display, and a StyleWriter 1200. It was around a 50% discount for being a student at the university. I spent two months gutting and rebuilding my friends parents RV for the money.
I hate cryptocurrencies.. For some meandering reason my point is this.
Computers were expensive in 1996. Some internet providers still charged by the hour.. I got a 14.4 connection using my friends dial-up info from the university. I paid 200 dollars for my modem.
So the barrier to entry to the internet was steep back then. So ordering pizza was a novelty. Computers were wildly expensive, internet was by the hour, and slow.
So might as well just pick up the phone and be done with it in two minutes.
Back to Bitcoin.. Don't say it is just like the internet. The internet was hard in 1996. I can drop a five on Coinbase and get Bitcoin, but I don't want to because it is stupid.
The bad bit about using DOMINOS website is the shitty popups and 'you want this?' 'you want that?' yum-cha style experience that wastes a lot of time.
Not flying-car level of techno-prophecy, but prescient in a way I didn't immediately pick up -- ADSL / cable improved our speed, but the significantly larger impact was from having always-on Internet access.
This device had the ability to order pizzas through Pizza Hut. I tried it once and it worked pretty well.
In major cities like Tokyo and Osaka, I had food in my hands in as little as 18 minutes after pressing "order" with an average around 25 minutes.
The software (ubereats) is the same, the difference is in restaurant efficiency and cultural norms.
It really is fast and easy[2] enough that it's become my default payment method in Poland, but honestly, prior to that, I kept going through the slightly more involved flow described in [0]. I really don't like giving my card details out, especially that at least three large e-commerce sites I did give those details to can pull money out of my account with zero confirmation or notice beyond me clicking the "buy!" button on the site, so I assume a criminal with access to that data could do it too (and it's a debit card, so I can't exactly do a chargeback).
--
[0] - Or with one of the intermediaries[1] that you know handles it, which without mobile payments I'd be using anyway. The intermediary lets you turn what would be "give your card details to the merchant/payment processor" flow into "login to your bank directly through your bank's login page to just authorize a transfer request from one of your accounts" one. The nice thing about it is that a) it's faster (I remember my bank credentials, not my card number), b) the whole is is PUSH, not PULL - I send them money, c) it's not tied to a card; I can pay from cardless accounts, and d) the merchant doesn't get my card number or account details. The UI flow is simple too, there's a string of redirects and prefills that make a payment with the intermediary just a few clicks, a login, and some 2FA thrown in the middle.
[1] - Like these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayU.
[2] - And safe! When you can get improvement on all three of the trade-off triangle, it only shows how much the older system sucks.
Why they don’t all have Apple Pay as an option, I do not know.
More to the point, that the web didn’t standardize UIs for payment and address information is probably a $100 billion mistake at least - in terms of what it costs everyone to do it their own way, and in lost time in having to constantly fill in the same form again and again.
The next big one might be the first person to order a pizza with a brain implant.
Except for dealing with people, friction is constant
They now have a satisfaction guarantee. If you call and say it was too slow, you'll be calmly told they don't offer a time guarantee, but if you were, for example, dissatisfied with your oder, you get free pizza.