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Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

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Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#61

Post by astrange »

wmichelin wrote: post #31
reaperducer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neither of those companies exist anymore so that doesn’t seem like a problem.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#62

Post by hahajk »

gnicholas wrote: post #49
nimbius wrote: post #45

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 traves…

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 nearb…

Ha, you didn’t even see the 30% that the restaurant paid Uber for your order.

https://restaurants.ubereats.com/us/en/pricing/

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#63

Post by drfuchs »

smarks wrote: post #57
fortran77 wrote: post #46

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.

The “Tin Man”? Is that the same as the Barfing Boy?

It's the one of the guy hanging out of the white structure at https://www.ilovemv.org/new-blog-1/category/public-art-tour3

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#64

Post by djmips »

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.

A dark day indeed. My favourite was El Amigo Burrito in Santa Clara which is still going...

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#65

Post by hamburglar »

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.

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.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#66

Post by 29athrowaway »

blabitty wrote: post #55
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.

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.

I guess you specifically refer to "Barbacoa de cabeza" rather than the more common "Barbacoa de res" (which is commonly made from beef roast).

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#67

Post by gnicholas »

mhh__ wrote: post #56
gnicholas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nearb…

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.

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.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#68

Post by lvturner »

kaishiro wrote: post #60
nimbius wrote: post #45

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 traves…

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.

I don't even like Domino's Pizza.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#69

Post by perl4ever »

nimbius wrote: post #45

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 traves…

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.

Re: Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992)

#70

Post by insaneirish »

CalChris wrote: post #38

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 th…

If the domain is "Mexican restaurants on Middlefield Rd", I have to vote for Sancho's in Palo Alto.
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