Tamale King: ecommerce website from 1990s | Hacker News Reader

Tamale King: ecommerce website from 1990s

tamaleking.com

114 pointsdatelligence78 comments

What I like most about this is that the site didn't fall over from the HN hug of death.

I assume it must be their massively scalable Kubernetes + NoSQL DB + CDN infrastructure.

In fairness, the hard part is scaling redundant HA phone operators. I'm sure between twilio, deep learning, and GPT3 they have the problem almost solved.

Riiing. Hi, I'd like to order tamale maker TK156.

No problem! Where in Tokelau would you like us to send 156 tamales?

I mean yeah, plain html/css scales well for any site that just exists to serve a couple lines of text and images. I can't think of a single site (outside of maybe craigslist) that can get by with that functionality today.

Newspaper sites are the obvious example you'd think of... but they need comments, advertising (or login functionality), moderation tools, etc.

But you don't have to regenerate everything on every pageload.

All of the features you mention can be done without JS using server side rendering.

It would of course be more convenient to use JS for advertisements, but logins and comments used to be implemented without using JS for many pages, even if JS was available.

HN is an example of such a site. This site does not have scaling issues due to login not using JS.

What is amazing is the story behind the product, http://www.tamaleking.com/page5.html, and how it really is a case of someone spotting a problem, learning multiple new specialized skills to create a solution, patenting that solution, and then making a living off of the invention.

People criticize the patent system in regards to software, but it has been reliably driving progress in meat space for a long time!

> When he reached our table I ordered a dozen for me and a dozen for each of my two friends. "That will be eighteen dollars" he said. As I was paying I told him that it was a lot of money for three dozen tamales

I mean, 50c/tamal isn't bad. Growing up in SoCal, homemade tamales bought on the street were 30c-$1/ea (sometimes less, in bulk). And that was without a tamale extruder. Honestly, I don't even see the point of this machine. People that could afford this won't enjoy the profit margins of making tamales and people who make tamales can already do it plenty fast for much cheaper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7EYf5h8HFc

> Honestly, I don't even see the point of this machine.

You can hire unskilled workers or open up a second store and the Tamales will be predictable.

The sellers referenced in my story (and the quoted one) were street vendors, not stores.

Places like El Pollo Loco, Del Taco, The Tamale Factory, etc already have their own (superior, based on images of the final product) specialized machinery.

Three points:

1) No optimization, no problem. Plain static HTML needs nothing more than maybe some basic caching. Apache hardly even knows it's there.

2) Why is this such a lost art? Why do we tell people to go learn full stack development when HTML can do the job quite well? Are we trying to compensate poor marketing skills by adding whiz bang buzzword bingo technologies?

3) If you are now hungry for Tamales, and I know you are, Costco (in the US) has great tamales in the refrigerated section near the pastas and sausages. They are muy bueno :)

What is a tamale? It's some sort of steamed maize doughnut?

Its not sweet (usually)... It is steamed though, and generally filled with some kind of yummy meat. For some reason, I grew up eating them with scrambled eggs so that's how I like em.

Sweet tamales are definitely a thing and, though a little less common, plenty common themselves.

More like...corn dumplings or Mexican(/Latin American) ZongZi. They can be sweet (sugar added to masa, then filled with raisins or other fruits) or savory (more common, salty masa filled with spicy or flavored meats).

I am currently hosting a website that has been around in pretty much the same form since the 1990's: http://www.marinerkayaks.com/ (https://web.archive.org/web/19991013075202/http://www.marine...) When their previous host crapped out, I had to recreate it from a combination of crappy old wysiwyg tool files and archive.org snapshots.

I'm glad I get to do it, it is an important part of our communities history and the "stolen kayak spreadsheet" still gets updated...

The tale of how this guy became the "Tamale King" is fantastically written, funny, and interesting.

http://www.tamaleking.com/page5.html

Seconded, this is a hell of a read. The guy's mother is the real hero.

EDIT This is a perfect example of the Hero's Journey [1]

Call to adventure: the kid selling tamales in the bar

Supernatural aid: his mother

The threshold: calling round the various suppliers

Challenges and temptations: making the tamales by hand

Revelation: he conceives the machine

Transformation: hiring the machinists, perfecting the machine

Atonement with the father: the patent attorney?!

Return: throwing the Cinco de Mayo party

Perfect, i tell you!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey

>make sure you have a broadband connection like DSL or Cable. This file is too large to download from a dial up connection.

Very emphatic, not like today's news portal which plays video automatically.

The counter element is interesting:

Interesting in that it calls a windows executable. Haven't seen that before, although it of course makes sense in cgi-bin.

Also interesting are the headers returned by Apache:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2021 13:34:42 GMT

Content-Type: text/html

Content-Length: 14792

Connection: keep-alive

Server: Apache/2

Last-Modified: Sun, 30 Jan 2011 09:02:49 GMT

Cache-Control: max-age=3600

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Etag: "39c8-49b0c90420040"

Expires: Thu, 28 Jan 2021 14:31:11 GMT

Age: 211

looks like pretty standard headers

I think it’s the last modified field...

It maybe used to be a Windows executable (or any other platform using the .exe extension), but it probably isn't these days - but of course they cannot simply move the script to a different place because it would break all existing counters.

You can still occasionally see this on some websites with old infrastructure or infrastructure that has grown over the years. For example if you book a train ticket in Germany through Deutsche Bahn, it will go through bin/query.exe!

Judging by the 404 error, I'd say that it's definitely not a Windows executable or anything else.

Your mention of Deutsche Bahn reminds me of how their first online timetable was some guy's email address, he extracted data from their CD-ROM, and created a service that periodically fetched his e-mails, parsed them (the timetable query had to have a particular syntax), processed the routes, and sent replies to the e-mails.

It ran on a (IIRC) 486 in his student apartment.

I wish I could link you to this story, sadly Google nowadays can give you train timetables, but it no longer cares what words you enter in a search query, it just thinks I'm looking for the schedule information of train services around me.

Having done this back in the day with Apache on Windows NT 4 Server... 'cgi' is a basic stdin/stdout formatting standard that almost any command line utility can be written to accommodate. In this case, the 'count.exe' would be tracking request counts and returning (via stdout) a dynamically built GIF image of the total number of visitors. Crude, but quite popular during the Web 1.0 days. In fact, the code would have been so simple, that count.exe on Windows and 'count' on Linux would have been the same thing.

This is one of the best landing pages ever because it sells the products with minimal UI, and decades after its inception, it renders perfectly fine.

I like this one even better and I think many of you will too. I refuse to close the tab just so I can look at it once in a while. It makes me smile. I might buy some tiny trees and a Hornby Peckett 614.

https://www.newmodellersshop.co.uk/

And it's fully responsive!

Amazing. Thanks for the link dude!

http://www.tamaleking.com/page2.html is very improperly formatted.

One of the best parts about growing up in So Cal was the fact that every once in a while there would be a few girls at school who would have coolers with dozens and dozens of hot homemade Tamale's for sale.

Similar to my experience growing up in Houston where it seems everyone has a side hustling abuelita tamale connection.

My parents grew up in suburb of Friendswood and this tamale truck [0] is a local legend. I remember early 80s it was the only thing on this FM road for what seemed like miles in either direction. I think it's 2nd generation owner now but I went by last year and it's still very good.

[0] https://goo.gl/maps/fkMrZPm4S4mHAW68A

every now and then there'd be people hawking tamale's at a store plaza's parking lot by our house. In our house we still repeat the phrase we heard from one of the sellers standing in the dark shadows under a tree in that parking lot saying "tamale, tamale, tamale".

Pretty awesome that tamale truck has a facebook page https://www.facebook.com/hottamales76

Our family tradition is tamales after Christmas. Usually the day after while extended family is still around. We also eat out Tex-Mex on Friday night including day after thanksgiving also while everyone is still gathered. I think it’s not uncommon to have some similar tradition for Texans of all backgrounds.

That Facebook page is wild. I could tell last time I went that the hipster foodies had discovered the place. But those lines are wild. It was never like that as a kid in 80s-90s. Any given drive by there was usually max of 2 cars, most commonly 0. There was no parking lot. Things like this are interesting part about getting old, seeing how change occurs over decades.

We used to buy them from a neighbor every week back in Texas. It was traditional for the older Mexican ladies to get together and make them on the weekends. Making tamales is quite a production, so you have to make a ton in one day and sell them over the week.

Did the school allow that? I'm happy they did, but surprised.

Yep. Every December the tamale lady would show up and sell out of the coolers in the back of her toyota pickup truck in the Ralph's parking lot.

Also you have the Ice Cream or Corn vendors pushing a cart around the neighborhood. I miss SoCal... the traffic sucks but so much else is wonderful.

Fast, clean, and so easy to navigate thanks to hyperlinked CTAs like "DOWNLOAD" and "ENTER HERE!"

It's perfect.

I also appreciate that it is considerate of its customers' Internet connection:

> This is the complete video. This is a large file, make sure you have a broadband connection like DSL or Cable.

> This file is too large to download from a dial up connection.

(The file itself is indicated as being 30MB)

Also, this site is on the fastest side of the Internet, despite seemingly calling an exe each time, as per other comments.

FREE VHS ;)

I take a lot of design inspo from this twitter bot that randomly chooses web archive screengrabs. Indeed, the free video offer seems to be a huge distribution trend circa 1996!

https://twitter.com/wayback_exe/

One site I recently stumbled upon from that golden era is the UofM's Geometry Center. Static content still displays. But interactive Java applet support in modern browsers is an issue.

http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/

I wonder if the company still exists. I'm seriously considering trying to get one. I'd kill for some tamales, but I never make them because it's an insane amount of work.

Back before the pandemic we would have tamale making parties, hang out with friends, make tamales, drink, eat tamales! That was a lot of fun!

This page has a scanned price list from October 2019.

http://www.tamaleking.com/page4.html

Nice work but it Lings Cars beats it hands down:

https://www.lingscars.com/

The impressive thing about that one is that it's still alive and working to support a going business that's delivered cars this week!

She gave the business to her staff and started riding a bicycle around the world? This one is bookmarked for reading tonight:

https://www.lingsbiketrip.com/about

It's... so fast! You click a link and BOOM the page loads. Sad that that experience isn't ubiquitous across the web anymore.

I can be, if you don't server everything through databases and app servers. Remember that HTML was really designed to work reasonably well in the age of dial-up modems, so it flat screams if you use it correctly.

(Also note that coming from the age before CSS dramatically helps both speed and code complexity - table-based layouts were certainly abused, but they had their advantages, too - and should still almost always be used for actual tabular data!)

Have a look at this, if you want a more modern way to build sites this fast: https://jamstack.org/generators/

For fun, I built a search experience for their product catalog using App Search this morning. https://agitated-heyrovsky-08b108.netlify.app/

It's sad that 25 years of technology has made for slower websites. I know it's a crude measure but this site scores a perfect 100 for mobile on PageSpeed Insights. Years later people are putting hours into trying to achieve a score in the high 90s, dreaming of hitting 100 so many years later - there are 500+ posts on SO about this.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

Hot tamale, you say? :-) http://weebls-stuff.com/toons/hot-tamales-animated-music-vid...

I saw the site, read the whole page. and I want to buy it. Good marketing.

Are we sure this is from the early '90s?

For reference, CERN released the original Web software to the public in April 1993, HTML tables (which feature prominently on this page) entered the standard toward the end of 1995, and the version of HTML this page uses, 4.0 transitional, was published in December 1997. In short, aside from the embedded YouTube video, this looks more like a late '90s website to me.

For reference, here is an example of what I would expect an early '90s website to look like: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Not much action pre-2001: https://web.archive.org/web/2020*/http://www.tamaleking.com/...

But can only get to '96

OK, we can take 'early' out of the title above.

"90 day limited warranty guaranteed to be free from defects in material and workmanship."

Is such a short warranty common in the states?

Retail warranty is usually 1 year, but this is B2B.

In my experience, 90 days is very common in B2B. Though I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it varies by industry.

archive.org's first snapshot is from June 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20010607155325/http://www.tamale... The public wayback machine started in 2001, however, they started archiving in 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine

This part's the best, full page ad chockfull of humor http://www.tamaleking.com/page8.html

the icing is the aol email!

I literally cheered when I saw that.

Is this actually an ecommerce site? I can't see a way to buy.

There's a phone number right on the front page.

I'm Mexican, and I know that there are different kinds of Tamales, that said, that machine does not make sense to me, I have never seen tamales like those.

I used to much thicker ones - is that what you have in mind?

You haven’t seen tamales like those? The cross section looks like 90% of tamales I’ve seen across Mexico. A quick production machine sounds like what the tamal market needs since it’s relatively labor intensive for such a simple food on the go that ends up getting prices at pennies anyways.

The pages are conveniently numbered so I can make sure to go through them in order which is nice.

I wonder what the creator of the HTML is up to these days - Robert Moseley.

1) It looks totally fine on mobile.

2) I want to hug that VCR gif like a long-lost friend.

3) I really want a tamale from this food truck looking gizmo.

They ought to sell t-shirts, I’d buy one.

a t-shirt about the product they sell or the nuclear bombproof ecommerce infrastructure they created on a Pentium 1?

I would totally love to be able to buy those spices and seasonings, even at prices adjusted for inflation.

Lightning fast. Does the job.

Way cool, with javascript! Ad_status.js, remote.js, and cast_sender.js!

I can see now how Amazon became a thing.

Today you, tomorrow me.

Obligatory: The official site for the 1996 film Space Jam is still up:

https://www.spacejam.com/

Dead at the moment. Tamale King 1, space ballers 0.

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