It's missing a form element. Clicking submit doesn't even send your name, street address or voice phone. They must have had to guess what kind of pizza you wanted and and where to send it by the ip address in the server logs. Funny how the Document Title and Document URL are in text fields at the top of the page.
This is how you could visually design and order pizzas via email-to-fax in 1990:
The MIT AI Lab had a program called AI:HUMOR;TS FTP, the Food Transfer Protocol, which was supposed to allow you to download pizzas and other kinds of food over the internet, but it had some bugs and limitations.
Wow, I looked at the screenshot and didnt think much of it, but when I looked at the source code I got sucked right in! Thats brilliant, I dont understand the language but the thinking and patterns of the software are visible and I found it easy enough to follow.
One thing I was curious about was how that icon stored near the end of the file looks when rendered.
Did you write this script? This is exactly the kind of fascinating stuff I come to HN hoping to find :)
Thanks -- I'm glad you appreciate it! I wrote it as a programming example for The NeWS Toolkit (TnT 2.0), which was an OPEN LOOK user interface toolkit written in Sun's NeWS, a multithreaded object oriented dialect of PostScript. NeWS was a network extensible window system developed by James Gosling, after he made Emacs and before he made Java.
Ben Stoltz came up with the idea for a "tatool" gui interface for ordering pizzas from Tony & Albas pizzaria down the road in Mountain View, which he implemented in XView using DevGUIde (Sun's GUI builder tool). It inspired me to write Pizzatool for TnT in PostScript by hand -- I remember staying up late at night writing snippets of PostScript code for each of the different pizza toppings!
My initial version would draw a preview of the pizza on the screen, and then fax the image over to the pizza parlor, which confused them a lot because they couldn't tell which ingredients I wanted by looking at the black and white halftone screen printed pizza picture. So the next version just printed text describing the ingredients and delivery instructions, which took a lot less time to fax and was a lot more readable than a halftone image.
There was a bit of a controversy internally at Sun about releasing and supporting the source code, which toolkit to use (there were a lot of politics surrounding that at the time), and unintentionally revealing Sun's secret multimedia pizza faxing strategy to the press. But I wrote a manual entry, disabled the email-to-fax feature, replaced it with a menacing pop-up notification that threatened to hold your pizza hostage until you payed your tab, and managed to ship it in Solaris/SVR4 as an OpenWindows/NeWS demo.
Andy Bechtolsheim used it as an example of Sun's multimedia strategy in a SunWorld interview, and Unix Toady wrote an article about it, so the fallout wasn't as bad as some people were afraid of.
The idea was to test out and demonstrate how to program many of the dynamic user interface widgets, menus, windows, and drag and drop techniques in TNT 2.0. For example, it forked off light weight threads to draw all your pizza toppings at once, and you could spin the pizza to "cook" it by rotating the pixels repeatedly, then drag and drop an image into the pizza to customize it! It could even interoperate with another demo called "RasterRap". Here's a video that demonstrates spinning pizzas and dragging and dropping images from RasterRap into PizzaTool, which I recorded at the Exploratorium years ago (PizzaTool demo starts at 21:40, and the white and red pizzatool icon is visible at 13:00 -- it looks like a pizza box):
Demonstration of SimCity running under the HyperLook user interface development system, based on NeWS PostScript. Includes a demonstration of editing HyperLook graphics and user interfaces, the HyperLook Cellular Automata Machine, and the HyperLook Happy Tool. Also shows The NeWS Toolkit applications PizzaTool and RasterRap. HyperLook developed by Arthur van Hoff and Don Hopkins at the Turing Institute. SimCity ported to Unix and HyperLook by Don Hopkins. HyperLook Cellular Automata Machine, Happy Tool, The NeWS Toolkit, PizzaTool and Raster Rap developed by Don Hopkins. Demonstration, transcript and close captioning by Don Hopkins. Camera and interview by Abbe Don. Taped at the San Francisco Exploratorium.
Wow thanks so much for the background info, and thanks for giving me a peek into the past! That makes a lot of sense about how it came about and what it was trying to accomplish, knowing the restraints the software was written under only makes the product you came up with more amazing!
The thing that strikes me the most about this whole thing is that your pizza tool is essentially the same functionality as Domino’s online pizza builder today—but it took the rest of the world a quarter century to recreate what you had in 1990?! Sometimes I feel like the consumer software market has hit the ‘pause’ button on the computer revolution and stalled forward progress for decades…learning about this tool backs that suspicion with proof. You were active during the golden age of desktop software, this must have been such and exciting time to be creating things.
“I would love to be able to order a pizza w/out all the hassles of talking to a human. O:-) ” — Angela Thomas
AMEN! I Loved this quote from the email exchange : ) About to watch your video now, can’t wait to see these ideas brought to life in motion.
Thanks again for the background info and links, feel free to send any further replies to tomhodgins@gmail.com in case this HN thread gets lost. I’d love to hear more about what you built since the pizza tool too, I’m fascinated!
The currently served "old" version was probably disabled to redirects to the modern ordering website so the antique non/functionality from ever interfering with the modern website and not lose sales by attempting to convert customers into the new funnel.
This is how you could visually design and order pizzas via email-to-fax in 1990:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/images/pizzatool.gif
Here's the manual entry and source code for PizzaTool, written in NeWS PostScript, which shipped with OpenWindows on Solaris:
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt
The MIT AI Lab had a program called AI:HUMOR;TS FTP, the Food Transfer Protocol, which was supposed to allow you to download pizzas and other kinds of food over the internet, but it had some bugs and limitations.