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Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

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Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#31

Post by wmichelin »

reaperducer wrote: post #29
Nextgrid wrote: post #7

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.

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? What ever happened to that?

They signed deals with Postmates and Caviar and now they can't ship features that will render those businesses irrelevant.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#32

Post by reaperducer »

thirtyseven wrote: post #5

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

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.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#33

Post by Nextgrid »

gerdesj wrote: post #26
Nextgrid wrote: post #7

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: $ burrito -time +:30 b+g+cc+jf+jf+sf+sc-sc+i"Black Beans"+n:2/Ross \ b+v:cc+g+cm+sc+i"no rice"/Kathie ( sigh no double dash long options and a horrific base food specification thingie - yes it is complete and well formed but it is still…

It is complex, but the advantage is that once I have the command figured out I can save it as an alias and be able to invoke it in seconds.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#35

Post by 29athrowaway »

duopixel wrote: post #22
29athrowaway wrote: post #4

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.

Nice to meet you, now you know one :) Tacos de lengua are quite popular in Mexico, probably catering to the Mexican-American community over there.

Nice to meet you, indeed. My family is Mexican and I haven't seen them eat these tacos yet.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#36

Post by tolbish »

flatline wrote: post #24
arthurcolle wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is fax 150 years old?

All the way back to 1843 - fascinating! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax

This is a very cool piece of trivia. I don't think anyone would presume the fax machine predates the telephone.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#37

Post by randomstring »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #28

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 WY…

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.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#38

Post by CalChris »

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.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#39

Post by randomstring »

neilv wrote: post #17

Related: 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... (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 w…

Hacker News thread on this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22925091

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#40

Post by ChuckMcM »

randomstring wrote: post #37
ChuckMcM wrote: post #28

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 WY…

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 :-).
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