
Pizza Hut’s First Website - for_i_in_range
https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html
======
p0cc
This is not strictly Pizza Hut's first website.

Pizza Hut's first website was built in 1994 [1]. This webpage has Javascript
(1995) [2] running Google Tag Manager (2012) [3]. The article about Pizza
Hut's first website [1] provides more context than just the webpage.

[1]:
[https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/pizzanet/](https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/pizzanet/)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#History)

[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Advert...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Advertising_services)

~~~
tgtweak
Amusingly, the date on this article and the fact it still loads today.

[https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
xpm-1994-08-25-fi-31168-...](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
xpm-1994-08-25-fi-31168-story.html)

~~~
jeffwass
Wow, very prescient amazing article!

Quote near beginning to put things in context of where we were back in 1994 :

“ To participate in the pilot, hungry Santa Cruzers need computers with
Internet access and a version of an Internet interface program called
_Mosaic_.”

But other interesting predictions:

“Instead of simply letting people order a pizza, why not let them design it as
well? Instead of showing an ordinary menu with a list of toppings, show a
picture of a pizza with the toppings clustered on the side.”

And then : “Why not customized T-shirts? Log on to the Internet and browse
through assorted logos and designs. Mix, match and modify them to suit your
interest. Then superimpose them onto the virtual T-shirt on the screen. Hit
the right key and within 48 hours your new shirt is Fed-Exed to the desired
address.

Of course, this network designability concept easily extends to bouquets of
flowers, boxes of chocolates, fruit baskets and the $6.85-billion annual
market in mail-order clothes shopping. It would be perfect for all kinds of
gift giving.”

~~~
excalibur
Fun fact: Googling "mosaic" today returns a page full of results about art.
Even if you search for "mosaic software", you get a bunch of software for
creating mosaics. If you want to read about Mosaic today, you need to already
know that it's a browser.

~~~
pm215
You can also find it if you know its full name, "NCSA Mosaic".

------
macintux
At my university, someone did a demo of what ordering a pizza would look like
online, using Pizza Hut's site as an example, sometime in 1994-95.

I remember thinking to myself that was a ridiculous idea, because all of the
stores would have to be wired up to the Internet, and who would do that?

That ignored, of course, the possibility that a central location could take
the orders and communicate them to the individual stores (which is how it
worked for phone ordering at one point, maybe even today), and I completely
whiffed on the future ubiquity of the Internet.

You could have made a fortune betting against my computer prognostications in
the 90s.

~~~
coldpie
> That ignored, of course, the possibility that a central location could take
> the orders and communicate them to the individual stores (which is how it
> worked for phone ordering at one point, maybe even today)

Wait, really? I worked in several pizza restaurants around the early 2000s and
we always took the phone calls directly. It was very common to get questions
about stuff like directions and opening hours, or weird special requests,
which I can't imagine working very well with a remote call center setup. I
don't want to doubt your claim, I'm just surprised to hear it.

~~~
jedimastert
It's actually true of Pizza Hut right now. I had to call in an order because
the online form didn't have the option I wanted, and the operator on the other
end definitely wasn't even in the same state I was.

I agree though, it was very surprising.

------
segfaultbuserr
I got a 403 forbidden message, but archive.org works.

* [https://web.archive.org/web/20140123215657/https://www.pizza...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140123215657/https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html)

> PizzaNet is Pizza Hut's Electronic Storefront and is brought to you by Pizza
> Hut® and The Santa Cruz Operation®

What, the original SCO, THE Unix company, built the website for Pizza Hut? The
original SCO dissolved in 2001, so it must be earlier?

~~~
smacktoward
The Web was a _huge_ driver of Unix adoption. Before the Web came along, Unix
was on the ropes. The conventional wisdom was that Windows NT would eventually
finish it off, owning the server space the way regular Windows owned the
desktop. But all the early tools for standing up a Web site were Unix-centric,
simply because the Web's roots were in science and academia rather than
traditional corporate computing. So when the Web started getting big, Unix
started getting big too, and never really stopped.

Presumably someone at SCO thought an online pizza ordering service would be a
good way to demonstrate the value a Web site could have for businesses. And
that demand for Web sites would in turn mean demand for SCO's Unix products.

~~~
choppaface
But the web-scale demand for SCO Unix never really materialized. Linux took
much of the marketshare while SCO went after IBM
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/02/ibm_vs_sco_revives/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/02/ibm_vs_sco_revives/)

~~~
ben1040
That wasn't the same SCO, the SCO that sued IBM was the Linux vendor Caldera
who purchased SCO's assets and renamed themselves as such.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
Yes, the original SCO was "good". It was Caldera Systems's CEO who started the
lawsuits, suing everyone, they even sued Novell for the Unix trademark, and
obviously got a notorious reputation and turned SCO into a dirty world. And of
course, it almost lost all cases and his company became an utter piece of
garbage.

Seriously, what was the CEO thinking about?! I guess Caldera Systems purchased
SCO, thought it was a good deal, but they suddenly found the days of
commercial proprietary Unix were ending and the purchase was a mistake, and
this is how they started its assaults.

------
mchaver
Let's collect all the internet's historical pizza moments. I've collected a
few from the comments here and added a few.

\- 1990, Don Hopkins uses the PizzaTool to fax a pizza order.

\- 1992, Snow Crash is published. Readers imagine interconnected virtual
worlds and action packed pizza delivery. Often quoted book in regards to
internet, MMORPGs and pizza.

\- 1994, Pizza Hut's Pizza Net allows users in Santa Cruz to order pizza.

\- May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz buys two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins (valued at
around 30 USD at the time).

~~~
welly
> May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz buys two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins (valued at
> around 30 USD at the time).

10,000 BTC = 63,317,800 GBP or 82,204,100 USD as of 2019-10-21 at 16:00 UTC

A lot of pizza these days.

~~~
auiya
I wonder if Pizza Hut still owns those 10k BTC they bought for the price of
two pizzas?

~~~
the137
If I remember correctly he traded the BTC to another user who then put the
pizzas on his credit card

~~~
hople_ul
And it was Papa Johns, not Pizza Hut.

------
harshbutfair
Redirects to the pizzahut.com.au main page for me.

~~~
jve
Yeah, looks like regional redirect. For me redirects to .lv which returns
SERVER NOT FOUND error. Probably should have been PIZZA NOT FOUND error or
PIZZA UNDELIVERABLE.

~~~
fortyseven
FoRbIdDeN pIZzA

------
axaxs
In a way, I miss the naive old web. Now you get popups, requests to have your
location, prompts to sign in before you can get deals, etc. In many ways a
simple web form asking for pizza is a better user experience.

~~~
genidoi
Imo, whatever annoying tradeoffs a commercialized web brought with it, it was
wholly worth it for giving literally anybody the ability to learn anything
they are curious about.

1080p Harvard compsci lectures[0] available for free would have been a pipe
dream in 1995.

[0] [https://youtu.be/e9Eds2Rc_x8](https://youtu.be/e9Eds2Rc_x8)

~~~
qplex
I agree It's pretty amazing what a resource the web has become, but I don't
think it's all that clear what trade-offs have been made, and if the
implications of those are just mere annoyances.

------
bobbygoodlatte
"Y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music,
movies, microcode (software),

and high-speed pizza delivery."

—Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson

~~~
Iv
"2020 was the year that would decide between two pizza deliveries techniques.
Amazon-Google drone-based delivery or the MIT's supersonic pizza railgun"

~~~
yk
An hypersonic railgun could cook the pizza using air friction. Also, it would
be faster.

~~~
Iv
But more expensive. However engineers estimate that an appropriate rail gun
would have 10 times the range of an average drone so would cover a wider area.

------
jplayer01
Apparently, the site automatically redirects me to the standard German site.
Fantastic. My hate for the modern web continues to grow. You could replace the
protagonists of I Have No Mouth with walking, talking websites and it'd
roughly mirror what I'm feeling right now. The only way I could see what
everybody was talking about was by checking out
[https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/pizzanet/](https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/pizzanet/)
and the archive.org page which were linked by somebody else.

------
NoblePublius
My father was head of marcom at SCO went this went live and my 8 year old self
was one of the first people to use this site!

------
baxtr
I thought I’d see a very old version, but I just see the current website... is
that their first?!

~~~
okramcivokram
Yeah, I'm getting redirected to the current website too. You can see the page
archived here:
[http://archive.is/https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/h...](http://archive.is/https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html)

------
geniium
What I see is :

"Access Denied You don't have permission to access
"[http://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html"](http://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html")
on this server. Reference #18.8a0a1602.1571725900.474a5bfd"

This could have been the old Pizza Hut web site, but I think this is just an
error, maybe due to server load?

------
belltaco
Pizzanet was started in August 1994, and was hosted at Pizza Hut Headquarters
in Wichita, Kansas.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120609100313/http://www.intere...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120609100313/http://www.interesting-
people.org/archives/interesting-people/199408/msg00057.html)

------
dougb5
By comparison, the current pizzahut.com home page makes 92 network requests,
including 34 potential trackers according to Privacy Badger.

------
darepublic
Looking at this old site, I see the future of the web. This navbar + hero + a
bunch of marketing fluff that nobody reads.. it's grandma/grandpa shit. It's
like those walmart photograph frames with teddy bears on them. It seems cool
now, you can make six figures making this shit, but it's ridiculous.

------
dawnerd
Didn't know they had Google Analytics back then.

~~~
mekane8
Came here to say that I bet that wasn't part of the original site!

------
dpkonofa
While probably not really Pizza Hut's first web site, I think this goes a long
way to show how a lot of the internet has actually regressed. We've gone from
this simple form that just asks "Who wants pizza and where can we call you?"
and, instead of going to "Who wants pizza and where should we bring it?", we
went to ads and pop-ups and to a place where, arguably, the process is way
more complicated than it needs to be.

Advertising kinda ruined the internet.

------
smacktoward
And ten years later they were innovating online again with "slash-pizza":
[https://money.cnn.com/2005/02/17/commentary/game_over/column...](https://money.cnn.com/2005/02/17/commentary/game_over/column_gaming/index.htm?cnn=yes)

------
arethuza
The first time I saw anything on a computer related to pizza ordering was the
Sun NeWS pizzatool:

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-
microsystems...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-
pizzatool-2a7992b4c797)

------
devwastaken
A few years back their site wouldn't work with some adblocker options, I
believe their js didn't handle the circumstances of if their geoip analytics
was blocks.

I just emailed their support, gave them the details, and they fixed it and
gave me a $20 card. Was a nice transaction.

------
xs83
What was the actual date on this? I assume it was wayyyy before 2014 haha.

Imagine telling them back then that someone could fill out all the details on
the website, choose their pizza and customise toppings AND have it delivered
by a robot.

They'd think you were high!

~~~
aflag
You could already select the toppings. Drone technology was not prevalent back
then, but no one would think you were high. They were living the dot-com
bubble. They would probably invest in that idea if anyone pitched it the right
way.

------
spilk
I remember the pizza ordering scene in The Net (1995) seemed very futuristic
at the time:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUSqX7B5DXs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUSqX7B5DXs)

------
ctdonath
Ah, memories. The frustration was they wouldn’t deliver from CA to NY.

Fascinating to watch technology go from world-changing bleeding-edge to
archeological discovery.

------
dmitrygr
It is ... glorious!

    
    
       <BODY BGCOLOR=#d0d0d0 TEXT=#000000 LINK=#0000ff VLINK=#5500cc ALINK=#ff0000">

------
wideasleep1
Requests too much PII! Run away!

~~~
magashna
Pizza Identifier Information

------
DonHopkins
The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first
pizza over the internet. (Oct 1990)

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-
microsystems...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-
pizzatool-2a7992b4c797)

------
shujito
I got redirected to the MX site

------
whalesalad
Wow, reminds me of the good ol' days of SCO Unix bashing.

------
quickthrower2
Now THAT is a tech company!

------
harikb
I wonder if they will be forced to add a GDPR notice for an unlisted subpage
:)

Oh they have Google Analytics and a link to a now-404-ed JS
[https://www.pizzahut.com/akam/11/6df12bd5](https://www.pizzahut.com/akam/11/6df12bd5)
. It is like they tried to maintain/upgrade at some point.

------
blakespot
Mozart's Ghost!

------
d-sc
It loads so fast!

------
nodesocket
Who is The Santa Cruz Operation®?

~~~
axaxs
SCO is synonymous with evil old school unix. A lot of mainframes ran it, and
my first job was dealing with some old SCO/ATT bastardized system.
Interestingly enough, I never bothered to know what SCO stood for until now.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
> _SCO is synonymous with evil old school unix._

The full name _Santa Cruz Operation_ only refers to the original SCO company
(which sold itself in 2001), not the _SCO Group_ which purchased SCO and
turned its name into a dirty word. Unlike the SCO Group, the original SCO was
old-school commercial Unix, but it didn't have such a bad reputation. Quite a
few hackers in the Unix world worked with the original SCO.

~~~
axaxs
Thanks for the history, seriously interesting! My interaction was shortly
after 2001, but on an ancient system. Guessing it had some parts from both
histories.

