Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)
mit.edu
mit.edu
Then along came the "Distributed Objects Everywhere" project (which invented CORBA) and they wanted an example application so they created "BurritoTool" which used CORBA to find the server that was connected to the fax line, and a nice WYSIWYG window to select your burrito condiments. Everyone loved it, it was a great tool and we all used it.
Then one day we show up and they tell us they have turned off their fax machine. We asked why, and they show us faxes for burrito orders that started coming in at 6AM and went non-stop until they turned it off. Some seemed legit but many were clearly not from someone who knew the place.
We go back to the office and do some snooping and see a bunch of requests to the burrito server in the wee hours before anyone is at work. We trace the IP address to a hotel in New York city. We call the Hotel and as it turns out Sun Sales is hosting an event and one of the things they are showing off at the "pavilion" is our cool distributed object technology. And using Burritotool! But CORBA has done its job and when it hadn't been told there was a local burrito server it sent packets back to HQ and found the one in the systems group lab. Starting at 9AM eastern and going all morning long, people had been making random burrito orders as part of the demo code!
It was a dark day for Bay Area Burritos when they tore down the building that housed La Costena and La Bamba. There was some Burrito magic on that corner of Old Middlefield and Rengstorff.
It was further down Rengstorff Ave.
My beef: the chances that someone setting up that demo would have gone "wait, hang on, where is this actually going?" would IMO have been significantly higher in a pragmatic/imperative/monolithic design context, because that detail would have been within the scope of consideration of the application itself. CORBA just makes that sort of thing disappear into... *gestures at everything and nothing*
The whole OOP notion of normalizing components and the connections between them is just a software encoding of bureaucracy meeting the human physiological response to Dunbar's number.
It's kinda sad that "let's build the perfect object-oriented communications system" can, when squinted at from the right angle, sometimes look like The One Last Thing We Will Ever Need To Do With A Computer To Build The Good Parts Of Skynet - all we get is (for want of a better word) institutionalization instead. And as the domain-specific semantic significance of discrete pieces of information are normalized^H"abstracted" away, it becomes extremely hard to regroup that significance into that mental place where we're able to subconsciously consider and weigh things up very effectively.
I wonder what the business equivalent to OOP is?
(One question: that writeup says Solaris 2, but I think I might've used PizzaTool under OpenWindows 2.0 on SunOS 4.1.1 on sun4c.)
Inspired by PizzaTool at the time, but my employer having a gazillion dollars of workstations and servers, yet none with a fax card (and my group having daily ad hoc lunch outings), I wrote LunchTool for the Suns. It was a GUI with a database of local lunch places, which someone could choose to decide on a lunch location and time and such, then print a fancy announcement sign to hang where everyone would see it. (Not everyone checked email, and I liked typesetting and programming PostScript anyway.) I was most proud of the bitmap burger icon.
When Google first solicited third-party apps for Android (it might've been a contest?), I almost stole the idea of PizzaTool, since it still seemed like a fun idea, as a gimmick or experience. Not that one really needed to see composited pineapple bits, to know whether they wanted it on their real-world pizza, but I thought the visual made adding toppings fun, and not a bad early demo for Android.
im serious. compared to the relatively clean, coherent and transparent burrito script, the dumpster fire that constitutes modern online ordering is an unforgiveable travesty.
again this is not delivery...no gig shit this is just simple pickup n go we're trying to do here but at the end of the byzantine transaction you make on a vendors website you've opted into a dozen mailing lists and you're getting menus and direct mailers from any and every local and non-local restaurant and bar...complete with mailers from the goddamn platform itself shilling you to either get in your car and play delivery drone or sign up for endless datamining.
and hell, you might not even be ordering from the restaurant itself. most of these platforms set up the virtual equivalent of a pop up tent in front of the business. If nothing else, this script has pushed me to reconsider email-to-fax orders to the handful of small local restaurants in the neighborhood.
I went through to the payment screen and was greeted by several delivery-related fees, including a "small order fee" (which presumably only applies to inexpensive orders) and a "service fee", and a "CA Driver Benefits fee". None of these fees apply on orders that you pick up yourself, so it's pretty dishonest to say "no delivery fee" front and center in the app.
The user only discovers these fees at the very last screen, once they've invested in researching restaurants, choosing items, adding them to their cart, and possibly coordinating with other family members regarding their preferences/orders. Basically, users are much more locked-in by the time they realize there are actually many delivery-related fees, even if the "delivery fee" itself is not applied (when I looked another time, this particular fee was much smaller (1/8-1/4) of the delivery-related fees that remained.
Honestly, I think I'm seeing a lot of rose-tinted spectacles here because I can order a burger to my door and track it all the way in about 15s flat if I want to with the Uber eats app. I really don't see what the problem is.
I understand the time/money tradeoff and would be happy to spend a few dollars to save myself a 20-30 minute roundtrip drive, but it seems like the cost of this convenience is much larger than I prefer, even though we only eat out occasionally.
The delivery has always been absolutely perfect to the point of actually needing the app to see where the driver is because it's usually early.
Now I can get a burrito made to order to my door in 20 minutes and I don't even have to hand over my credit card details to a minimum wage server. I'll take this Byzantine system any day.
I don't even like Domino's Pizza.
Another one seems to be using something called ChowNow, which appears to have monthly fees instead of commissions, which I imagine might also make a big difference financially to its clients.
Could probably pair with a static CMS for photographs of the food. Delivery is, of course, a whole different problem to tackle.
Yes, this is what I hate most about these delivery services. I hope restaurants start a union and take back control.
xcostena was an early X app done at SGI back in the day; fill out a form and it would fax the order to La Costeña. Arguably the beginnings of ecommerce. Back then, they were the closest available calories. This was before SuperMac Technologies started the gourmet lunch trend that companies should compete for their workers time.
La Bamba had the best meat; just a plain pollo burrito was a thing of glory, and their carnitas was transcendent. But La Costeña was where it was at if you wanted a burrito with stuff in.
They also have a photo of their "world's longest burrito" record in the store, and on their website:
Everyone who wanted to explicitly invite certain guests (we actually had to keep a fairly strict door for a variety of reasons, not least of which was that a good frat party at CMU could have 300-400 people there concurrently) would have to create a text file in their public folder on Andrew, chmod that file to be read, and place with line separators up to 10 Andrew userIDs to be read and compiled by a script.
It worked fantastically, aided no doubt by the fact that our house was ~50% ECE, CS, or IS majors.
Everyone has a phone number. It's amazing what a regression the modern web is over 150 year old tech like Fax.
It's a totally federated still widespread platform. All you need is a directory and some idea of an order form. You can probably pick up a form the first time you visit, take a menu too.
The whole thing just sounds so lovely.
I think this is one reason 'Shockwave Rider' [0] from 1975 still holds up quite well today. IIRC the author (John Brunner) had people using their phones to access remote computers and didn't go into tech details of how they actually did this. When I read it more recently, it held up much better than (say) Arthur C. Clarke novels from the same era, because Clarke as a hard-SF technologist tried e.g. to predict what future gadgets might look like and how they might work.
$ burrito -time +:30 b+g+cc+jf+jf+sf+sc-sc+i"Black Beans"+n:2/Ross \ b+v:cc+g+cm+sc+i"no rice"/Kathie
(sigh no double dash long options and a horrific base food specification thingie - yes it is complete and well formed but it is still bollocks:
FoodSpec::=<type>[options*][/<name>] <type> ::= [b|t|m|q|T] (burrito, taco, mexico city, quesadilla, Taqitaco) )
RLY? Even in 1992 RAM was not too scarce. There was no reason to be so compact in form. If it was then those + symbols can go and better choices of options made to avoid ambiguity.
Now I'm stuck with whatever crappy interface the Grab and Gojek developers give me on my shitty mobile phone (imagine people wanting to use their 1920x1080 screen instead of a phone to order food...)
Wasn't Google supposed to solve this for us? Wasn't the news crammed for a week with demos of a disembodied Google-powered ordering Chinese food by telephone?
What ever happened to that?
Do order app orders show up on a printer? Or is it some awful proprietary app and there's a dedicated iPad chained to the wall?
I drove past that corner just the other day. The old crappy building has long been torn down and replaced by a modern multistory building. The burrito operation had long moved across the street and a little down the road to a former fast food joint but I believe is gone now.
Probably not much. Faxmodems were a thing in the 80's. Maybe not common in the early part of the decade, but common enough that we had one in my home at least by 1988.
Source: http://plinth.org/techtalk/?p=81
All the "PostScript" developers then got SparcStations.
the requirements are that you must designate a specific email 'from' address that can send faxes, you put the destination fax number in the subject line, and the email must contain a .PDF attachment which is the contents of what you want to fax.
you could have a shell script that would collect the burrito ingredients requested, generate a pdf, send it to an smtpd on localhost, with an appropriate smtp relay path outbound from your LAN to get to voip.ms
see section 7 here. you don't need a DID dedicated to incoming faxes to use the outgoing service. https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Virtual_Fax
I love the effort that went in to an amazing UX, particularly the super-intelligent defaults (name from /etc/passwd, etc.)
How many apps today put so much thought into using the resources available to them? This is the mark of a developer who seriously cares about his work and his users.
That strip mall is long gone now. Even when we used to go to Carambas in the 80's, it looked ancient.
If I was him, I wouldn't have added the "lengua" option. I have not yet met a person that likes to eat lengua.
Tacos de lengua are quite popular in Mexico, probably catering to the Mexican-American community over there.
Maybe he still has screenshots! I really want to see what MacBurrito looks like.
EDIT: Some fun snippets from his (public) resume:
* Wrote XBurrito, a Motif-based GUI for ordering food from a taqueria via fax
* Wrote MacBurrito, an innovative approach to CABO (Computer-Aided Burrito Ordering). It features a virtual tortilla and a drag-and-drop interface for specifying your order
Gonna make a goal to use a JavaScript web GUI to pass data to python to generate a fax that sends burrito orders. Should be a perfect into project
He had the various binaries on his public home space, probably mounted to every machine via NFS, under his own name - and this was inside a company, so it would be his co-workers potentially using it.
That's quite a few degrees of separation from anything like a phishing attempt.