Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#1

Post by dhotson » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 12:05 AM UTC

Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)
mit.edu

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#2

Post by sneilan1 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 12:58 AM UTC

Maybe the source for burrito.c still exists?

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#3

Post by 11thEarlOfMar » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 1:06 AM UTC

It was called 'The Burrito Tool'.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#4

Post by 29athrowaway » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 1:06 AM UTC

Oh 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.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#5

Post by thirtyseven » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 1:07 AM UTC

Can't help but wonder if receiving a professionally typeset burrito order by fax would have raised any eyebrows in 1992.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#6

Post by gerdesj » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 1:09 AM UTC

"In keeping with long standing Unix tradition, the syntax for specifying burritos is somewhat obscure."

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#7

Post by Nextgrid » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 1:11 AM UTC

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.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#8

Post by nexuist » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 1:13 AM UTC

sneilan1 wrote: post #2

Maybe the source for burrito.c still exists?

I found this article from the aforementioned Steve: 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

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#9

Post by walrus01 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 1:16 AM UTC

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

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

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#10

Post by tyingq » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 1:18 AM UTC

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