This brings back the memories. Another true story to add to this one. I (like many Sun cohorts) loved the burritos at La Costeña market, and we had adopted the FAX trick from Adobe.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!
Related: Sun had a demo for NeWS (fancy desktop display system) called PizzaTool. Don Hopkins did a writeup: <a href="https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...</a><p>(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.)<p>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.<p>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.
compare this nearly 30 year old script with the absolute red hot hell of trying to order anything at all through toast,caviar,grub hub,uber eats or postmates and you'll want to check out the latest RCS and build it on X86 before the end of the day.<p>im serious. compared to the relatively clean, coherent and transparent burrito script, the dumpster fire that constitutes modern online ordering is an unforgiveable travesty.<p>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.<p>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.
La Costeña is still in business. They were on Rengstorff and they're on Middlefield now. Either they're not very good or my expectations have increased considerably.<p>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.
There was a pizza hut franchise in Santa Cruz that would also do online orders in the same time period. The HDQ eventually worked with that franchise owner and made "pizza net". They still have the old page up: <a href="https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html</a>
Believe it or not, this is very similar to how we handled the guest list for our fraternity parties in the early/mid 2000s at CMU.<p>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.<p>It worked fantastically, aided no doubt by the fact that our house was ~50% ECE, CS, or IS majors.
I wish we could have something similar in modern times. Instead, we have a handful of equally-shitty delivery platforms with terrible and bloated UIs and no API.
Oh yes! I was at Adobe working with Curtis Jackson and Ross Thompson when I first saw this thing. And La Costena was the best! The building that Adobe was in then is now occupied by Google. It's the one with the "Tin Man" in front of it.<p>All the "PostScript" developers then got SparcStations.
This brings back great memories! At the time I was a brand new CS grad living the dream at Sun in Mountain View and La Costeña was my introduction to real burritos. Their veggie burrito is still the best I've ever had.
so if this was still being done by fax machine, you could replicate the same functionality today with some commerical ($1.50/month plus 0.009 per minute) email to fax services.<p>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.<p>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<p>see section 7 here. you don't need a DID dedicated to incoming faxes to use the outgoing service.
<a href="https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Virtual_Fax" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Virtual_Fax</a>
This brought me so much joy.<p>I love the effort that went in to an amazing UX, particularly the super-intelligent defaults (name from /etc/passwd, etc.)<p>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.
La Costeña is pretty good, but my favorite was a place called Carambas in a strip mall on the corner of Mary and Washington in Sunnyvale. They had a jalapeño burrito that would make your face sweat.<p>That strip mall is long gone now. Even when we used to go to Carambas in the 80's, it looked ancient.
Oh man, this is great. He even had a .costenarc file with the options, haha.<p>If I was him, I wouldn't have added the "lengua" option. I have not yet met a person that likes to eat lengua.
Man this is a perfect project app for learning python.<p>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
See also <a href="https://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=106747&cid=9090595" rel="nofollow">https://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=106747&ci...</a> which would try to have pizza delivered to the office you’re logged in from.