10 ms·
Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)
- sneilan1 6y agoMaybe the source for burrito.c still exists?
- nexuist 6y agoI found this article from the aforementioned Steve: http://plinth.org/techtalk/?p=81 http://plinth.org/techtalk/?p=81 Maybe he still has screenshots! I really want to see what MacBurrito looks like. EDIT: Some fun snippets from his (public) resume: * Wrote XBurrito, a Motif-based GUI for ordering food from a taqueria via fax * Wrote MacBurrito, an innovative approach to CABO (Computer-Aided Burrito Ordering). It features a virtual tortilla and a drag-and-drop interface for specifying your order
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoIt was called 'The Burrito Tool'.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoOh man, this is great. He even had a .costenarc file with the options, haha. If I was him, I wouldn't have added the "lengua" option. I have not yet met a person that likes to eat lengua.
- selimthegrim 6y agoI do, if cooked long enough. There used to be a place in Santa Barbara called Super Cucas that I think perfected Mexican food
- duopixel 6y agoNice to meet you, now you know one :) Tacos de lengua are quite popular in Mexico, probably catering to the Mexican-American community over there.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoNice to meet you, indeed. My family is Mexican and I haven't seen them eat these tacos yet.
- monkpit 6y agoLengua is great - you just have to get it from a place that sells enough of it so that it isn’t old or bad.
- blabitty 6y agoIt's pretty popular in South Texas. Beef is King in Texas and the parts of northern Mexico that it borders that may have something to do with it. There is also "barbacoa" which traditionally is a whole cow head slow cooked in the ground - tongue, cheek, brains and all.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoI guess you specifically refer to "Barbacoa de cabeza" rather than the more common "Barbacoa de res" (which is commonly made from beef roast).
- thirtyseven 6y agoCan't help but wonder if receiving a professionally typeset burrito order by fax would have raised any eyebrows in 1992.
- reaperducer 6y agoCan't help but wonder if receiving a professionally typeset burrito order by fax would have raised any eyebrows in 1992. Probably not much. Faxmodems were a thing in the 80's. Maybe not common in the early part of the decade, but common enough that we had one in my home at least by 1988.
- mulmen 6y agoI wonder how the experience on the restaurant side compares to the delivery apps. Fax machines and printers in general are essentially designed for this workflow. Do order app orders show up on a printer? Or is it some awful proprietary app and there's a dedicated iPad chained to the wall?
- gumby 6y agoNot at la costeña. They were pretty imperturbable. Plus it was here in the Valley, where apartments that came with internet connections had been around for a couple of years. This was all pre web of course. I drove past that corner just the other day. The old crappy building has long been torn down and replaced by a modern multistory building. The burrito operation had long moved across the street and a little down the road to a former fast food joint but I believe is gone now.
- urbandw311er 6y agoApparently the restaurant distributed its own order form for completion then sending via Fax. The original author of the program reproduced it in Postscript almost perfectly, including the typos! Source: http://plinth.org/techtalk/?p=81 http://plinth.org/techtalk/?p=81
- gerdesj 6y ago"In keeping with long standing Unix tradition, the syntax for specifying burritos is somewhat obscure."
- Nextgrid 6y agoI 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.
- mulmen 6y agoI was just thinking of this. I have a couple spots near my office (when that is a thing) that have this exact problem. Big lunch rush with long lines. Everyone has a phone number. It's amazing what a regression the modern web is over 150 year old tech like Fax. It's a totally federated still widespread platform. All you need is a directory and some idea of an order form. You can probably pick up a form the first time you visit, take a menu too. The whole thing just sounds so lovely.
- arthurcolle 6y agohow is fax 150 years old?
- flatline 6y agoAll the way back to 1843 - fascinating! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax
- tolbish 6y agoThis is a very cool piece of trivia. I don't think anyone would presume the fax machine predates the telephone.
- vidarh 6y agoI find it fascinating as a demonstration of William Gibons "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" how much tech like this turns out to be much older than what people today expect. Another example would be video-telephony (a cctv-like commercial and publicly available video-telephony network operated in Germany 1936 onwards; it was "just" fixed booths at the post-offices of a few cities, but still; and the idea dated back to just a couple of years after the telephone)... Turns out you can write a lot of very prescient-sounding scifi by taking tech that already exist but isn't widely known, and positing a world where it is everywhere... (half of what people sometimes think Jules Verne "predicted" for example where things that existed in his time - including the Pantelegraph "fax" service)
- walrus01 6y agoso 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. 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. 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 see section 7 here. you don't need a DID dedicated to incoming faxes to use the outgoing service. https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Virtual_Fax https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Virtual_Fax
- tyingq 6y agoThere 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: https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html
- tcbasche 6y agoThis redirected me to my local pizzahut.com.au, and I get an Access Denied via curl :(
- rootsudo 6y agoWorks fine for me, but in USA. Cloudflare/conditional access does that... try archive or a proxy!
- tyingq 6y agoGoogle's cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.pizzahut.com%2Fassets%2Fpizzanet%2Fhome.html http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...
- erik_seaberg 6y agoSee also https://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=106747&cid=9090595 https://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=106747&ci... which would try to have pizza delivered to the office you’re logged in from.
- imagi 6y agoThis 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.
- neilv 6y agoRelated: Sun had a demo for NeWS (fancy desktop display system) called PizzaTool. Don Hopkins did a writeup: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems... (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.) 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. 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.
- randomstring 6y agoHacker News thread on this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22925091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22925091
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoTen years later, not only could you order burritos with your PC, you could also cook burritos with your PC courtesy of the Intel Pentium 4.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoThis 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. 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. 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. 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!
- randomstring 6y agoDuring my tenure at Sun the burrito tool faxed your order to Burrito Real (good, but not the institutions that La Costena and La Bamba were). Maybe this was in the wake of La Costena turning off their fax machine. It was a dark day for Bay Area Burritos when they tore down the building that housed La Costena and La Bamba. There was some Burrito magic on that corner of Old Middlefield and Rengstorff.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoAs I recall, (it has been awhile!) it was "El Burrito Real" as a play on El Camino Real but yes, it was a loss. Fortunately we've still got Super Taqueria which makes a decent burrito, but I don't think they have any franchises up where you are :-).
- abotsis 6y agoLooks like a phishing attempt to me: “download this binary to order burritos”!
- h2odragon 6y ago> "supply me with the name of a machine to do the compile on"
- mst 6y agoThere's ... no downloading involved. He had the various binaries on his public home space, probably mounted to every machine via NFS, under his own name - and this was inside a company, so it would be his co-workers potentially using it. That's quite a few degrees of separation from anything like a phishing attempt.
- CalChris 6y agoLa 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. 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.
- drmpeg 6y agoI agree. Current day La Costeña on Middlefield is nothing to write home about.
- neild 6y agoI’d do much for one more burrito from the old school La Costeña. They were so good. La Bamba had the best meat; just a plain pollo burrito was a thing of glory, and their carnitas was transcendent. But La Costeña was where it was at if you wanted a burrito with stuff in.
- philsnow 6y agoWas La Bamba the place that had the very very long burrito?
- neartheplain 6y agoThat's La Costeña. Their "super burrito" was very long indeed, compared to other taquerias where "super burrito" is typically the same length but with guac. As I recall, they had a mockup super burrito mounted on the wall along with the regular and small sizes. They also have a photo of their "world's longest burrito" record in the store, and on their website: http://costena.com/ http://costena.com/
- insaneirish 6y agoIf the domain is "Mexican restaurants on Middlefield Rd", I have to vote for Sancho's in Palo Alto.
- drmpeg 6y agoLa 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. That strip mall is long gone now. Even when we used to go to Carambas in the 80's, it looked ancient.
- nimbius 6y agocompare 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. im serious. compared to the relatively clean, coherent and transparent burrito script, the dumpster fire that constitutes modern online ordering is an unforgiveable travesty. 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. 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.
- gnicholas 6y agoI recently opened UberEats because I was given an Uber gift card. There was a promo that said "no delivery fee" and I thought, "that seems too good to be true, but let's see." I then saw a promo for a local donut shop that was buy-one-get-one for certain items. It appeared that I could have two donuts delivered to my door for just a few dollars. This seemed too good to be true, although the donut shop is pretty nearby. I went through to the payment screen and was greeted by several delivery-related fees, including a "small order fee" (which presumably only applies to inexpensive orders) and a "service fee", and a "CA Driver Benefits fee". None of these fees apply on orders that you pick up yourself, so it's pretty dishonest to say "no delivery fee" front and center in the app. The user only discovers these fees at the very last screen, once they've invested in researching restaurants, choosing items, adding them to their cart, and possibly coordinating with other family members regarding their preferences/orders. Basically, users are much more locked-in by the time they realize there are actually many delivery-related fees, even if the "delivery fee" itself is not applied (when I looked another time, this particular fee was much smaller (1/8-1/4) of the delivery-related fees that remained.
- fortran77 6y agoOh 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. All the "PostScript" developers then got SparcStations.
- smarks 6y agoThe “Tin Man”? Is that the same as the Barfing Boy?
- rdtwo 6y agoMan this is a perfect project app for learning python. 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
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- joshu 6y agoi should do something with the burri.to domain name. maybe a burrito search engine?
- exogeny 6y agoBelieve 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. 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. It worked fantastically, aided no doubt by the fact that our house was ~50% ECE, CS, or IS majors.
- thrwoe2423432 6y agoSeems much cleaner and easier than today's bloated apps and websites. I can see why the Japanese hold on to their fax machines.
- llimos 6y agoThis brought me so much joy. I love the effort that went in to an amazing UX, particularly the super-intelligent defaults (name from /etc/passwd, etc.) 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.
- Reason077 6y agoIt's amazing how far the world has advanced in just 29 years!