The first thing that ever sold online was pizza (2018) | Hacker News Reader

The first thing that ever sold online was pizza (2018)

thehistoryoftheweb.com

107 pointsBrajeshwar85 comments

Prancing Pony vending machine at Stanford AI Lab as remembered by Les Ernest:

[1974 Computer controlled vending machine (Prancing Pony), which had a gambling option and automatically billed via email]

The Prancing Pony Vending Machine was evidently the first computer controlled vending machine anywhere in the world. It was created to fill an unmet need.

Given that SAIL was about five miles off-campus and the nearest food source was a beer garden (Zotts) about a mile away, I initially set up a coffee and food room near the center of our facility and it subsequently got named after a pub in Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings". In fact all rooms in our facility were named after places in Middle Earth and had signs posted on the doors showing their names in both Latin and Elvish alphabets. At some point the Stanford Buildings folks asked me to number our rooms and give them a map. Instead we gave them a map showing room names in both alphabets. Their response was to send out a carpenter with numbered tags, which he nailed on each door.

Meanwhile we took turns buying coffee and food, which was offered for sale on an honor system basis. That worked well for awhile but it suddenly started losing money big time. We then negotiated with Canteen, which had an exclusive contract with Stanford, to put in a couple of vending machines. However we found that they were not restocked often enough and broke rather frequently.

I finally negotiated to rent a machine from Canteen that we could restock. They seemed to like this idea since it would relieve them of making frequent trips out to our distant facility. In fact they never billed us for the rental even though I repeatedly called it to their attention. Meanwhile I got Ted Panofsky to make a connection to our computer so that it could release the doors on the vending machine, thus making it possible to buy either for cash or, though a computer terminal, on credit. I then wrote a program that let people buy under password control and that billed them on a monthly basis via email. It was set up to randomly give away whatever was purchased on 1/128th of the purchases and offered a "double or nothing" option, which had an honest 50:50 outcome. I noticed a cultural difference in that almost none of the computer science students gambled, knowing that they would win 1/128th of the time if they didn't, whereas many of the music students did gamble. In both cases the Prancing Pony vending machine, having taken on the name of the room, seemed quite popular and we organized a team of volunteers to acquire the needed supplies and restock the machine at least twice a day.

The Prancing Pony also sold beer but only on credit and only to people over 21, since it knew everyone’s age. If a youngster attempted to buy beer it responded “Sorry, kid.”

Some years later I found out why the honor system had failed in the Pony. I was the founding President of Imagen Corp., which made the first desktop publishing systems using laser printers, and after awhile there a young woman employee felt obligated to confess that when she was a teenybopper, she and her girlfriends used to ride their horses up to SAIL, then went in and stole candy from the Prancing Pony. Thus, her misconduct contributed to a technological advancement.

> ...she and her girlfriends used to ride their horses up to SAIL, then went in and stole candy from the Prancing Pony.

In isolation this is a rather surreal thing to read as fact rather than fantasy.

As an aside, it seems like there was a lot more quirkiness in academia in the previous century. While the SAIL and MAC stories seem more quirky than typical for academia, it's not hard to find contemporary pockets of weirdness in any discipline.

To me it feels just another part of how the world has gotten smaller over my lifetime.

Amazing stuff :) Thank you for taking the time to pass this bit of history on.

Fantastic story, thank you. I am an avid student of the early days of computing and have heard most of them, so this was a real treat.

I built an online computer store for my employer in late '94. It never went anywhere because the guy I worked for kept saying "What are you building this for? Nobody will ever put their credit card into the internet." We were making sales but they didn't have the vision to keep it up-to-date so it died on the vine.

https://github.com/steveclarke/vintage-online-store

At the time there were only two other online stores that I knew of - Internet.net and egghead.com.

I've never programmed a CGI-BIN in Perl before but I must say... that code is _elegant_.

Perl and early HTML were a match made in heaven. But notice how HTML and the Web has become so complicated it still looks the same platform, but it ain't. My theory is that Perl died a slow death because the Web grew on a different axis than Perl's ideal niche, which is text manipulation.

At the time, HTML was just marked up text.

What really "killed"[0] Perl were two main things:

1) PHP: Perl is great for general text processing, but it has warts that really bother people who aren't used to the language. PHP is slightly better for working with HTML (because it is designed for the purpose). While I think PHP's warts are worse, they tend to more bother people who are used to the language. This dynamic will tend to cause PHP to take new users that would otherwise go to Perl.

2) It's hard to overstate how profoundly alien the mid-90's/early-2000's were in terms of web software. In particular, proprietary tools were everywhere, and were just believed to be better for some reason. ColdFusion, ASP, and JSP all saw a ton of use (remember, the JVM was only beer-free at the time). The free software tools were comparatively scarce. There were zero notable free software web browsers until 1998 when Netscape was open-sourced. Even Windows ran on most of the servers. LAMP wasn't even coined until 1998[1]. Perl just wasn't established enough before Ruby on Rails and AJAX took over.

That second point is closely related to what you said, though.

[0]- It's actually alive and well, you just hear about it less often [1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_%28software_bundle%29

JSP wasn't proprietary even if it was not yet open source. The writing was on the wall that Java would eventually be open source. Further the Java community process (the JCP) was an open to all. I literally voted a few times. Very different from coldfusion and asp.

I’m not sure my first reaction to the use of process ids as query params for session identification would be ‘my, that is an an elegant solution’.

I’m curious what aspect of the stacks of print calls outputting strings of escaped HTML with inline variable substitutions strikes you as an ‘elegant’ match between Perl and HTML?

I use perl on a regular basis to manipulate text and display as webpages via cgi-bin

As soon as I see Perl with & prefixes on functions I know I'm in for a good time. Really awesome piece of history.

cgi-bin was comfy

Starting in 1992, DUX Software sold the version of SimCity online that I developed for HyperLook/NeWS/SunOS/Solaris (and then later a multi player version of SimCity for TCL/Tk/X11/various versions of Unix), by distributing a fully functional unlockable demo via FTP, so customers could download it over the internet, play the demo for a while (then the demo melted your city after a few minutes), decide to buy it, then call up (or fax) and read their serial number and credit card number over the phone, and immediately receive a key to unlock the full version of the game.

I got flamed by people who didn't approve of us using the internet for commercial purposes, but they hadn't gotten the memo about how that old rule was now obsolete, since the internet was not longer strictly a military / academic project, so I ignored them.

https://groups.google.com/g/fj.mail-lists.x-window/c/TopRfOj...

    If you don't have a key, SimCity will run in demo mode.
    Run the 'GetKey' script or select 'Get Key...' from
    SimCity's 'File' menu to get a key.

    Now that you have installed SimCity, you can run the "GetKey" shell
    script to get a license key from DUX software, or run "SimCity" in
    demo mode without getting a key. In demo mode, your city will melt
    after 5 minutes, or when you try to save it to disk, so buy a license,
    it's cheap! When you buy a license, DUX will ship you the latest
    version of the software, a nice 100 page manual with lots of nifty
    illustrations, and a handy reference card. And when you're ordering,
    don't forget to ask how to embezzle funds!

    % GetKey
    To get a key for SimCity, contact DUX Software at:

    DUX Software
    4906 El Camino Real
    Suite 1
    Los Altos, CA 94022
    Phone #: 1-800-543-4999
    or 1-415-967-1500
    FAX #: 1-415-967-5528

    and give them your server code.

    Your server code is: 1234 5678 9012 3456
    Please enter your key: 9876 5432 1098 7654<return>

    Feature name: 16 [16]
    Number of licenses: 1

    Key successfully installed.
    % SimCity
    Got a license!

    Now you're playing SimCity! An introduction window will pop up while
    the rest of the system loads. Then the startup screen will appear.
    Point the cursor at the controls and pictures and press the "Help" key
    (usually at the lower left corner of the keyboard) to learn how to use
    the user interface!

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.newprod/c/5KWv25ckYHc/m/MgG...

    AVAILABILITY:
    Multi Player SimCity is available directly from DUX Software, and
    via anonymous ftp from ftp.uu.net (192.48.96.9), in the directory
    "vendor/dux/SimCity". You may freely copy it, and play the fully
    functional game in "demo mode" on one display without a license, but the
    city melts every 5 minutes. If you enjoy SimCity, you can buy a license
    over the phone by credit card, without leaving your seat! A single
    player license lets you save and restore your cities, and play for as
    long as you like on one display; a multi player license lets you play
    SimCity with your friends over the net!

    PRICING:
    Single Player Node Locked License: $49
    Multi Player Node Locked License: $89
    Single Player Floating License: $129
    Multi Player Floating License: $149

    PLEASE CONTACT:
    DUX Software, 4906 El Camino Real, Suite 1, Los Altos, CA 94022
    Phone #: 1-800-543-4999 or 1-415-967-1500, FAX #: 1-415-967-5528
    Email: simcity@dux.com

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-anno...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-revi...

>Dux did an excellent job porting Simcity to UNIX. There is little inconsistency between the UNIX version and the PC and Macintosh version. The graphics are fantastic, and the sound effects -- including a ship's whistle -- are realistic. After installing the program, be sure to get the license key. Without it, the computer lets you play awhile, but then destroys your city without warning. [...]

>Simcity for Sun workstations has some added features not available on other platforms. Dux ported Simcity to Unix using Hyperlook from the Turing Institute Ltd. (Glasgow, Scotland), and added a Postscript drawing tool. The tool lets you create simple drawings, and import them into other products such as Framemaker from Frame Technology Corp.

>Simcity also has pie menus, or wheels with a tool on each spoke, for quick access to construction tools. Another nifty feature is zoom windows, which let you choose whether to display more detail or more area in a selected window. With the large monitors common on SPARCstations, zoom windows make it easier to track events in the city. Large monitors also let you open and view many windows simultaneously, which lets you gain easier access to information such as population growth rates and pollution problems. According to Dux, its networked multiuser version, which includes support for audio conferencing, was slated for release by April.

I wonder how many times my credit card info was emailed in plain text after entering it into a form just like that one.

Oh boy, thousand line Perl script. Here we go again...

Interesting that the first online sale and the first Bitcoin transaction are both commonly accepted as being pizza.

I like the idea of a pizza purchase being something of a “Hello World” of new financial transactions. Moving forward I will be keeping an eye out for pizza purchases made leveraging a new technology (and proceed to invest heavily).

The first thing Aeneas eats as soon as he lands on the beach is also pizza!

Heh interesting

https://www.wondersandmarvels.com/2013/12/how-aeneas-invente...

The bitcoin pizza thing is illustrative of all the crypto BS to come. The pizza was bought using US dollars from a pizza shop that didn't know what bitcoin was.

The ingredients for the pizza bought online were probably bought in person at a restaurant supply store with no web presence. Everything has to start somewhere.

If I give you a Simply Red CD and you buy me a pizza in exchange, no one would state that the CD bought the pizza.

In fact as far as the pizza place is concerned it's your pizza not mine.

What do you mean? Was a pizza not sold for Bitcoin?

Here's Papa John's saying it was:

https://twitter.com/PapaJohns/status/1396221079748677632

Do you mean it was sold through an intermediary accepting Bitcoin? Is that not a sale still?

Yeah, Papa John's is bragging about this first ever BTC tx to buy pizzas from them when in fact some guy from overseas in GB (Laszlo was living in Florida) took up the offer from the online forum [0] and paid for the pizza via credit card, so Papa John's obviously couldn't care less.

>A British man took up Hanyecz's offer and bought the two pizzas for him in exchange for the 10,000 Bitcoins. Even then the recipient of the Bitcoins got himself a bargain, paying $25 for the pizzas, while 10,000 Bitcoins were worth around $41 at the time. [1]

My guess is - since in those early days all enthusiasts were basically "hardcore computer nerds" - the significance of buying a pizza via BTC was at least partially implied through the common knowledge of Pizza Hut's "experiment" in 1994.

[0]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.0

[1]https://www.investopedia.com/news/bitcoin-pizza-day-celebrat...

Edit: Imhv "Silk Road" was the game changer for BTC tx selling/buying goods[3]

[3]https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-history-part-15-silk-road-i...

When you think about the number of middlemen involved in a credit card transaction, 1) the credit card networks (i.e. Mastercard, visa, etc…), 2) the credit card company/issuer/bank (i.e. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc…), 3) credit card processor (i.e. fidelity, square, etc…)…is one more where we draw the line?

It’s really no wonder the average consumer needs to resort to financing their pizza with debt on account 3 middlemen have worked their way into the transaction, all of which are multi-billion dollar organizations that add no value aside from facilitating the very ridiculous debt driven system they created.

Until such day nobody talks about how much a bitcoin is worth in US dollars I don't consider it a currency. I imagine few people get their salary in BTC and even fewer pay their bills in BTC.

There were some experiments with actually using cryptocurrency directly in the Netherlands but it all petered out.

And here's Papa John's CEO John Schnatter stepping down because he criticized the NFL for not dealing with the “take a knee” anthem protests against police brutality in a manner timely enough to shore up its shrinking, potentially pizza-ordering viewership:

https://qz.com/work/1164231/papa-john-is-out-as-ceo-because-...

And here's the neo-Nazi media outlet Daily Stormer saying how much they strongly agree with and support John Schnatter's and the Alt-Right's racist views, and proclaiming "Papa John: Official pizza of the alt-right" with a picture of a "SIEG HEIL PIZZA" decorated with a swastika made of pepperoni:

https://www.newsweek.com/papa-john-alt-right-nazis-white-sup...

Do you really believe everything that Papa John's Pizza and John Schnatter and the Daily Stormer tweet?

I remembering hearing lore of an alternate implementation for a local pizza joint that would accept fax orders in the valley. Someone whipped up a pizza builder with the boilerplate info and hooked it to the modem.

Press go and it would fax an order to the pizza place and pizza would show up soon.

That Pizza Hut site is cool, but I love finding a "natural API" and hooking into it in a way that doesn't really show up differently - no pizza engineering required, no middle man, just trust.

It was the key-tapping robot for high-speed-trading, but for pizza.

Are you thinking of pizzatool?

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

That's right, and it was in 1990, several years before 1994.

Ben Stoltz at Sun wrote the original "TATool" (TA stood for "Tony and Alba's", the name of a Mountain View pizza parlor that took orders via fax) in XView using the DevGUIDE user interface builder tool. It used Sun's as-yet-unannounced NeWS based PostScript=>FAX email service to send a text order via FAX to Tony and Alba's Pizza.

When he showed it to me on 23 Oct 90, I played around with it and accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet, and had to call them on the voice phone to cancel the order, since I was only playing around with TATool.

Since I was working on a different NeWS based user interface toolkit that was implemented in PostScript (The NeWS Toolkit or "TNT"), I decided to make a graphical version of PizzaTool to show off the capabilities of NeWS, that drew a colorful picture of the pizza, and faxed a black-and-white image of it to Tony and Alba's, instead of a text order. It made a round window on the screen and drew all the toppings as you selected them, and even let you spin the pizza to "cook" it by "melting" the pixels.

The first time I faxed an image of a pizza to Tony and Alba's, they were mystified because they couldn't tell which toppings to use just by looking at the black and white image, so I improved it by drawing black text with white outlines over the pizza image to make it easier to read.

https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*EvKv1m2UbxuPJ1Mg9oGUqQ.pn...

>As it turns out, it takes a hell of a long time to fax a picture of a PostScript pizza, because the PostScript halftone scales and jaggies turn on and off and on and off so quickly and unpredictably that it’s extremely inefficient for the fax algorithms to compress, and very susceptible to line noise. Fax was just not designed for that kind of computer generated imagery!

I posted a message about it to some mailing lists, and the industry trade rag "UNIX Today!" did a back cover article on it, so it got a lot of attention, and I got in trouble for revealing Sun's top-secret multimedia FAX strategy. And that kicked off huge flame war on internal Sun mailing lists, and a manager finally had to ban all discussion of pizza.

I quietly continued to develop PizzaTool, implementing drag-and-drop support so you could drop images into your pizza and spin them, cleaned up the code, wrote lots of documentation and comments, and a manual entry, to make it into a NeWS programming example for TNT developers. We finally shipped PizzaTool as an official part of OpenWindows 3 on the release of Solaris Unix SVR4. (Although I had to disable the fax feature, since it was just meant to be a TNT user interface demo and PostScript programming example.)

Here's the manual entry and source code, which is a great example of object oriented PostScript programming in NeWS:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6

> That's right, and it was in 1990, several years before 1994.

And despite HN comments about modems, you probably remember that in 1990 John and I wired up my apartment building with direct Internet connections for a more civilized and usable environment. Though I think the first thing I bought online in 1990 was a La Costeña burrito.

Was it one of La Costeña's teeny tiny single user burritos that's still bigger than your head, or one of their EXTRA-LARGE multi user burritos that weighed 4,456.3 pounds and was 3,578 feet long, so big you had to photograph it from an airplane to capture the entire thing?

http://costena.com/famous.html

The single user burritos would usually feed silke and me for a couple of days.

The US is currently shipping La Costeña super burritos to Ukraine for use against the Russians. Once the government’s strategic stockpile is depleted they will be ordering more.

Direct how? No ISP?

By being an ISP: The Little Garden, which also provided internet services to Cyborganic, Wired, and Hotwired in San Francisco, and of course the early Cygnus offices in Gumby's apartment complex in Palo Alto.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670035

https://www.sr-ix.com/Archive/TLG/

https://www.sr-ix.com/Archive/TLG/TLG.html

https://www.wired.com/1996/04/jennings/

Oh yeah. I remember Gilmore’s involvement in that. Makes sense..

The first POP was my spare bedroom, ending up with a wall full of modems and CSU/DSUs.

The term “ISP” did not exist; as far as I know the only other “ISP” at the time was Barry Schein’s The World in Boston.

I was always slightly nervous playing with pizzatool that I would accidentally order a pizza and have it delivered to Scotland and be expected to pay the delivery charges. ;-)

I used a service like this in the mid-90s in another country. I found it pretty cool at the time, I could choose what pizza I wanted with HTML forms and a fax was sent. The irony at the time however was, they recommended you called to check they got your order because the fax machine wasn't reliable?!

"Instead, we order online, pay online, interact online, and then go back to our 'real lives.'"

That's the gist of it. The perception of a split is because we were familiar with the world before this was possible or existed in any capacity. But our real lives now is the ability to order food without talking to anyone and have it anonymously delivered to our door. We collectively contributed to that future and made it happen. It might not be better, but nobody born today will consider that "not real".

I saw a meme the other day that reminded people of when I was younger that when we wanted to talk to a friend, we needed to call their home number, talk to their parents then be handed over to our friends.

Now we don't even have home phones.

Related: “Ordering burritos from my SPARC” – http://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/marthag/postscript/burr...

Also PizzaTool, as mentioned elsewhere in the comments.

YES! The Burrito Server!

With that wonderful man page.

The article more or less admits this but it probably wasn't the first thing sold online. There was a music store (CD Connection) that was telnet accessible before graphical web browsers (or any web browsers) were common, for instance.

France had a functioning e-commerce platform in the 1980s:

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/online-since-the-80...

Someone told me it was weed

https://www.cannaconnection.com/blog/18264-first-thing-sold-...

This is exactly what I was thinking. This was folklore like 30 years ago.

"Someone", yeah, right! ;)

Did you get a lot of seeds in 1972?

Online?

> computer science students at Stanford and MIT first used the Arpanet network to sell other students a tiny amount of cannabis. The deal took place in 1971.

I seem to recall NCSA httpd (the origin of Apache) distributed an example CGI program for ordering subs from a local store - Jimmy John's, I think. The CGI took the form input and forwarded it to an email-to-fax gateway to send to the sub store.

Would that predate this pizza place? Or does it not count because it wasn't done under the direction of the store?

I found evidence that such an example existed, at https://www6.uniovi.es/~antonio/ncsa_httpd/info/Scripts.html ("For example, let's order a sub." links to "cgi-bin/jj", where "jj" almost certainly means 'Jimmy Johns').

However, it is not present in the earliest archive.org copy (from 1997) at https://web.archive.org/web/19970303192746/http://hoohoo.ncs... nor in the latter ones that I spot checked.

The ftp server is no longer available, and archive.org doesn't have a copy either.

A Google search on "For example, let's order a sub." finds only that Spanish server.

I was able to find a copy of jj.c at https://pastebin.com/FB1hEKP1 . It has no internal date information. See https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/cs252/lab5-http-server/lab5-... if you don't want pastebin's tracker.

Here's what the form looks like - http://www.diam.unige.it/informatica/documentazione/httpd_do... .

This repo archives a bunch of ncsa httpd releases: https://github.com/TooDumbForAName/ncsa-httpd

cgi_src/jj.c exists in 1.1, but not 0.5 (and no versions between those two are in the archive)

0.5 - 6 sep 1993 - http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q3/0828.ht...

1.0 - 13 dec 1993 - http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q4/0811.ht...

1.1 - 24 jan 1994 - http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1994q1/0282.ht...

I suspect it was added by 1.0 as that's when "the htbin stuff is no longer distributed, CGI/1.0 versions of your old favorites are included instead", but definitely exists in the 1.1 snapshot on github.

It was modified or removed at some point later on, after complaints from Jimmy Johns about abuse.

Cool! And that means it predates the pizza example.

Though then it's a question of what "sold online" means, vs. "ordered online".

Yeah, I can well believe it's easily abused!

Was that scene in "The Net" a reference to this?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ordering-pizza-online...

The dates kinda check out. The movie came out in 95, but seems like Pizza Hut launched this in 94. As I recall their sci-fi writing wasn't as insulting as most sci-fi, so it wouldn't surprise me that this was inspired by the real PizzaNet. Not sure what film schedules actually look like though.

Pizza was also one of the first "real" purchases made with crypto/bitcoin: https://www.coindesk.com/learn/what-is-bitcoin-pizza-day/

Off topic, but the first ever spam I received was for 'frozen escargot' from some company in New York, which as a comparatively impoverished first-year student at university in the north of England in the 90s struck me as more than a little peculiar.

I'd always prefer to see such random spam then the nth advert for the same item I happened to google last month (* to be fair, as I use Firefox ad-blocked to the hilt, I rarely see that sort of thing any more either).

Title isn't accurate, as others pointed out. Eg. Minitel in France predates 1994. Also, it depends on your definition of "online". Eg. I think you could buy things via Teletext before 1994. And buying things via phone probably also predates 1994 - both for buying products (tv sell stuff), but also services (eg. group chat, or adult lines).

How about telegraph? It was used for stock market, I bet you could order some food!

18th century France had net of signaling semaphores, all communication was encrypted...

And after that you had Telex (and telephone of course). If your bar is that a transaction was agreed to over some sort of network even if money exchanged hands otherwise, it goes back pretty far. Certainly, ordering from a catalog over the phone and giving a credit card number isn't fundamentally different from putting that card number in an email (and, yes, plenty of people used to be fine with that) or entering it in a webform.

Interesting thing is that World Wide Web was founded inside CERN on the Franco-Swiss border near the LHC to share its data with scientists of the world.

Before CERN, the French including Louis Pouzin worked on the CYCLADES network, used to build Arpanet and Internet.

- Amazingly, PizzaNet is still up for your viewing (but not ordering) pleasure.

Only, I suspect, if you are in the USA. Here in New Zealand you get redirected to https://pizzahut.co.nz/home . Rather fittingly Internet Archive is able to help https://web.archive.org/web/20140105075626/https://www.pizza... .

Hmmmm, it turns out the archive only has the first page then, after 'continue', you get a much more contemporary page. Maybe that's true outside the archive too ?

Like sooooo many others here have pointed out, this isn't the first thing to be sold online.

Peapod grocery delivery started in 1989 and was a DOS-based application you could order through, if you had a modem.

And here we are almost 30 years later and you can order a pizza with Terraform[0] and pay with Bitcoin.

[0]: https://github.com/nat-henderson/terraform-provider-dominos

Original website for buying pizza, complete with SCO logo at the bottom!

https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html

and the most expensive pizza...

https://www.coindesk.com/learn/what-is-bitcoin-pizza-day/

Interesting to compare 12 years later for each of these. The web exploded to take on this use case and more. It still doesn’t make sense to pay for a pizza with bitcoin

I wouldn't buy a pizza with a nugget of gold either.

That said, you're right... easy small transactions that don't go through a credit/bank card, would be nice. Especially when traveling or living in other countries.

> easy small transactions that don't go through a credit/bank card, would be nice.

Why? I'm hard pressed to see practical benefits over contactless card/phone/smartwatch payments for small sums. Yes, they work already internationally - at least with some definition of international.

I personally don't like the idea that I'm selling all of my personal financial data to the highest bidder, who I don't know, nor do I benefit from. That might not be something that bothers you, but it bothers me.

Update: apparently there is even a product now for credit cards...

https://watcher.guru/news/edge-unveils-bitcoin-mastercard-fo...

Per swipe fees get icky for small purchases. Something else could work better (or the fees could be reduced)

Of course, that something doesn't look like today's cybercurrency either.

There are L2 chains that are less than a cent per transaction.

For one you wouldn't have to deal with credit card companies who are massive cludges for society.

>... easy small transactions that don't go through a credit/bank card, would be nice. Especially when traveling or living in other countries.

Wait till you hear about physical non-traceable fungible tokens that you can carry in a hardware wallet in your pocket.

Coincidentally, the first thing ever bought with Bitcoin was also a pizza.

https://www.yahoo.com/video/bitcoin-pizza-day-sees-first-112...

The first thing sold online was marihuana in around 1972 between students at Stanford and MIT.

This seems to imply that “Ananas Pizza” was the first pizza ordered online in the late 80s.

Also has a fun blast from the past of it being used.

https://youtu.be/XoTiQ3NkYXQ

If "sold" can include trading things of value for other things of value, I'd say the first thing ever sold online may have been credit card numbers and dial-in access codes for the earliest ISP's.

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

I know i'm not the first or last, but the PizzaNet pizza builder just looks so functional and responsive. Why did we stray away from design like this?

I wonder if French had pizza over minitel in the 80s.

It is a well-known fact that the Adult Entertainment industry is always the first to integrate new technologies. The most (in)famous part of Minitel were the "minitel rose" services ('rose' as in 'pink', I'll let you figure it out =).

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel_rose

Hah the Controversies section mention bots, maybe Musk should buy it...

I heard somewhere it was marijuana.

The Net

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