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543

At one point in time there were some Linux command line tools that someone built so you could order a pizza right form the shell. I don't remember when that was though. Probably either the late 90's or early 2000's.

Archive: https://archive.today/VZAiV

Also: Amazingly, PizzaNet is still up for your viewing (but not ordering) pleasure.

From the post:

>If you happened to live in Santa Cruz in 1994 you could sit down at your computer, open up your favorite browser, and then go ahead and order a pizza online. You could do all of this on PizzaNet, owned and operated by Pizza Hut. PizzaNet was an experiment that launched in the early 90’s, a way for Pizza Hut to test the waters and see if this World Wide Web thing had a real shot at a future. It was proposed by a particularly ambitious Pizza Hut owner in Santa Cruz, and developed by a few folks at a development shop known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). This being something of a trial run, the site itself was kept pretty basic. Yet it bursted with possibility. Any web user could go online, visit pizza.net, fill out a form that included their pizza choice, address, and phone number and just like that, get a pizza delivered straight to their door. The web may not have been exactly designed for this purpose, but that didn’t stop it from being pretty incredible.

At one point in time there were some Linux command line tools that someone built so you could order a pizza right form the shell. I don't remember when that was though. Probably either the late 90's or early 2000's. Archive: https://archive.today/VZAiV **Also:** Amazingly, PizzaNet is still up for your viewing (but not ordering) pleasure. From the post: >>If you happened to live in Santa Cruz in 1994 you could sit down at your computer, open up your favorite browser, and then go ahead and order a pizza online. You could do all of this on PizzaNet, owned and operated by Pizza Hut. PizzaNet was an experiment that launched in the early 90’s, a way for Pizza Hut to test the waters and see if this World Wide Web thing had a real shot at a future. It was proposed by a particularly ambitious Pizza Hut owner in Santa Cruz, and developed by a few folks at a development shop known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). This being something of a trial run, the site itself was kept pretty basic. Yet it bursted with possibility. Any web user could go online, visit pizza.net, fill out a form that included their pizza choice, address, and phone number and just like that, get a pizza delivered straight to their door. The web may not have been exactly designed for this purpose, but that didn’t stop it from being pretty incredible.
[–] • 3 pts (edited )

Compuserve had online shopping in the 80s. Book Stacks was online in 1992 and had books.com by 1994...

I remember dialing into Book Stacks with a modem and FTP.

[–] • 2 pts

Yeah, I think its a little misleading. This would be maybe one of the first major "known brands" that did something specifically like this but I do recall even at least basic "catalog like" online ordering before 1994.

It was right about not that many people being online back then though. I remember using very slow dialup (14.4) in a text based world then later the "browser" became popular and you had stuff like the early days of Netscape and others. AOL brought a LOT of people online but it felt like a walled garden keeping everyone in their platform as much as they could.

[–] • 2 pts (edited )

I'd go with "One of the earliest things you could buy on the WWW," since "The Internet" consisted of Gopher and FTP before that.

Book Stacks may even have pizza beat. That was literally my first experience with online shopping.

[–] • 2 pts

Well, the irony is one of the first "public" purchases made using Bitcoin was pizza. Man... To have been the guy that sold that pizza back in the day. I think it was worth something like $18 but was like 30k bitcoin or something...

[–] • 1 pt

Bitcoin started with pizza too. I guess programmers really like pizza.

[–] • 1 pt

I’m gonna go on a limb and says the first thing “sold” online was drugs. Likely two nerds “bro can I buy a dime bag?” Yeah man. Likely on usenet But I don’t know I am sure these writers researched it extensively.