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.
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!
During 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.
As 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 :-).
Not to embark upon the most pointless internet debate in the world, but I'm absolutly certain that's a mistake. Note that there's another yelp listing for just "Burrito Real" at the same address, and the reviews of the one you link also refer to it as just "Burrito Real." And my gigantic belly from living a block off Rengstorff for years is my cite. :D
La Costeña is now further down Middlefield in the shopping center at Whisman. They’re no longer a grocery store, more like a regular taqueria. They still make decent burritos and similar food.
La Bamba, which had moved to Middlefield and Rengstorff, recently gave it up and went truck only. The truck parks in the O'Malley's Sports Pub lot on Old Middlefield.
they actually took over the O'Malley's kitchen. They are doing truck there as temporarily measure. The truck will continue with different menu once the kitchen is open.
Burrito Real was actually same owners as La Costena. They just expanded the burrito operation into its own location. There was a period of overlap where they were both operating, but Burrito Real was significantly more convenient due to the size and the parking lot.
This is both an awesome story and IMHO a great example of why "scalability" and "future-proof design" and object-oriented-everything-successfully-talks-to-all-the-stuff-that-hasn't-been-written-yet are not the be all end all.
My beef: the chances that someone setting up that demo would have gone "wait, hang on, where is this actually going?" would IMO have been significantly higher in a pragmatic/imperative/monolithic design context, because that detail would have been within the scope of consideration of the application itself. CORBA just makes that sort of thing disappear into... *gestures at everything and nothing*
The whole OOP notion of normalizing components and the connections between them is just a software encoding of bureaucracy meeting the human physiological response to Dunbar's number.
It's kinda sad that "let's build the perfect object-oriented communications system" can, when squinted at from the right angle, sometimes look like The One Last Thing We Will Ever Need To Do With A Computer To Build The Good Parts Of Skynet - all we get is (for want of a better word) institutionalization instead. And as the domain-specific semantic significance of discrete pieces of information are normalized^H"abstracted" away, it becomes extremely hard to regroup that significance into that mental place where we're able to subconsciously consider and weigh things up very effectively.
(NB. The intersection of programming language design and psychology is something I find incredibly interesting, so if you disagree with the my parent comment, can see glaring flaws in it, or have otherwise constructive criticism, I would very much like to know.)
(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.
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.
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.
I 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.
It might be a difference in jurisdiction, but I've never noticeably been caught out by this in the UK.
Honestly, I think I'm seeing a lot of rose-tinted spectacles here because I can order a burger to my door and track it all the way in about 15s flat if I want to with the Uber eats app. I really don't see what the problem is.
American prices rarely if ever include taxes in the listed price. This is something that americans are used to, and will usually budget extra money for when they go to pay, but it catches a lot of people from other countries off guard.
How much more does it cost you than if you picked it up yourself? I'd also be curious to know how a burger in particular holds up through the delivery process.
I understand the time/money tradeoff and would be happy to spend a few dollars to save myself a 20-30 minute roundtrip drive, but it seems like the cost of this convenience is much larger than I prefer, even though we only eat out occasionally.
The one I usually get is one of those delivery only joints I think but the delivery fee is usually a flat few quid tops (£3 at most, almost zero for the less popular ones).
The delivery has always been absolutely perfect to the point of actually needing the app to see where the driver is because it's usually early.
That's great — I hope this sort of pricing becomes more common! I just checked, and getting UberEats to deliver a $14.99 Impossible Burger will cost me $10 in fees (not including tip or taxes). The restaurant is 3 miles away.
I avoid all the middlemen gig economy food delivery apps entirely. One I do like is the Little Caesars smartphone app in combination with their pizza portal, it really is seamless and a social anxiety sufferer's dream. Little Caesars is an entirely private single corporate owner company; I feel like there is a Linux to BSD analogy somewhere in here.
I dunno - I always thought we had it pretty good now. Previously delivery options were limited to the handful of takeout menus you had stuck in a binder - not knowing if they were up to date, if they were running specials, etc.
Now I can get a burrito made to order to my door in 20 minutes and I don't even have to hand over my credit card details to a minimum wage server. I'll take this Byzantine system any day.
I'm with you on that - longer than I care to think ago, I used to order takeaway almost exclusively from Domino's pizza because I could order it online and have it delivered.
v1.0 of anything is never perfect. UberEats, DoorDash, etc are not v1.0 of deliveries. Online ordering in the early 00s were atrocious. Modern day services should at least be v2.0, but it seems like we are only at v1.5 (v1.0 reskinned and more options). These apps also seem to be run in the style of the mafia in that they take as much from all of their "stores" until they bleed them dry.
At least one of the better restaurants I know of in my area seems to have its own online ordering set up and functional, I'm assuming they have needed to cut out the cost of grubhub etc just to survive. Nice to see it working for them.
Another one seems to be using something called ChowNow, which appears to have monthly fees instead of commissions, which I imagine might also make a big difference financially to its clients.
It would be pretty straightforward to set up a modern-day version of this low-bloat pickup-ordering:
- Simple web form with e.g. stripe integration (only paid-for orders are submitted)
- Server to process orders and send to restaurant
- Local computer and printer (or fax/vfax setup) at the restaurant
Could probably pair with a static CMS for photographs of the food. Delivery is, of course, a whole different problem to tackle.
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.
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.
I’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.
That'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:
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: https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html
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.
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.
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.
Have you read the documentation for this beast? It is complete but I would not describe it as easy to use. To be fair, we could probably slap an API and a GUI on top of this nonsense:
RLY? Even in 1992 RAM was not too scarce. There was no reason to be so compact in form. If it was then those + symbols can go and better choices of options made to avoid ambiguity.
At least it's something you can work with: write your own interface against, program an UI on top of it, or whatnot.
Now I'm stuck with whatever crappy interface the Grab and Gojek developers give me on my shitty mobile phone (imagine people wanting to use their 1920x1080 screen instead of a phone to order food...)
I 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.
I 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)
> 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
I think this is one reason 'Shockwave Rider' [0] from 1975 still holds up quite well today. IIRC the author (John Brunner) had people using their phones to access remote computers and didn't go into tech details of how they actually did this. When I read it more recently, it held up much better than (say) Arthur C. Clarke novels from the same era, because Clarke as a hard-SF technologist tried e.g. to predict what future gadgets might look like and how they might work.
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.
Wasn't Google supposed to solve this for us? Wasn't the news crammed for a week with demos of a disembodied Google-powered ordering Chinese food by telephone?
Not 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.
Apparently 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!
Can'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.
I 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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
That strip mall is long gone now. Even when we used to go to Carambas in the 80's, it looked ancient.
It'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.
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
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.
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!