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: