
PizzaHut still serves its first homepage - narfz
http://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html
======
camperman
I was in Santa Cruz at SCO Forum when PizzaHut took its first ecommerce order
and delivery. It was 1995 or 1996 I think. It made the news that evening while
a bunch of us were sitting in a bar in Carmel. My abiding memory is that the
news clip was tagged Information Superhighway.

------
cromulent
The Space Jam movie website is still up from 1996, and it still has working
links.

[http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm](http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm)

~~~
ddoolin
Wow, I knew this was there but hadn't opened the console before. Quite the
throwback. <center>? <nobr>? <font>?! Neat.

I'd never seen a <map> tag either: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ma...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/map)

~~~
CiaranMcNulty
You kids... I was the king of <MAP> back in the day

~~~
JshWright
Oh man... I'm having flashbacks to how badly that tag got abused...

Who needs HTML? Just create the layout in photoshop, export the whole thing to
a flat image, and map all the links...

~~~
yuhong
At least it is not as bad as the older server side image maps.

------
frik
"The Net" (1995) movie thriller with Sandra Bullock about the early internet
and cyberterror featured it (named pizza.net) too:
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/) ,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(1995_film)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_\(1995_film\))

Photos of all websites featured in the movie: [http://gizmodo.com/every-
webpage-from-the-1995-movie-the-net...](http://gizmodo.com/every-webpage-from-
the-1995-movie-the-net-1592821504)

~~~
Moru
That's funny, it's on swedish TV _right now_. No I'm not going to watch it.

------
jamessantiago
According to wikipedia[1] this was one of the earliest websites to be created.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_before_1995)

~~~
danbruc
Not sure how accurate the numbers [1] are but some interesting numbers there,
relevant here [2].

[1] [http://www.internetlivestats.com/](http://www.internetlivestats.com/)

[2] [http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-
websites/](http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/)

~~~
rb2k_
At least this says 1993:

    
    
        $ whois pizzahut.com | grep Creation
          Creation Date: 07-dec-1993  
          Creation Date: 1993-12-07T05:00:00Z

~~~
nrs26
That's a cool trick. Didn't know you could do that.

~~~
simlevesque
Whois or Grep ?

------
DonHopkins
It's missing a form element. Clicking submit doesn't even send your name,
street address or voice phone. They must have had to guess what kind of pizza
you wanted and and where to send it by the ip address in the server logs.
Funny how the Document Title and Document URL are in text fields at the top of
the page.

This is how you could visually design and order pizzas via email-to-fax in
1990:

[http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/images/pizzatool.gif](http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/images/pizzatool.gif)

Here's the manual entry and source code for PizzaTool, written in NeWS
PostScript, which shipped with OpenWindows on Solaris:

[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6)

[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt)

The MIT AI Lab had a program called AI:HUMOR;TS FTP, the Food Transfer
Protocol, which was supposed to allow you to download pizzas and other kinds
of food over the internet, but it had some bugs and limitations.

~~~
err4nt
Wow, I looked at the screenshot and didnt think much of it, but when I looked
at the source code I got sucked right in! Thats brilliant, I dont understand
the language but the thinking and patterns of the software are visible and I
found it easy enough to follow.

One thing I was curious about was how that icon stored near the end of the
file looks when rendered.

Did you write this script? This is exactly the kind of fascinating stuff I
come to HN hoping to find :)

~~~
DonHopkins
Thanks -- I'm glad you appreciate it! I wrote it as a programming example for
The NeWS Toolkit (TnT 2.0), which was an OPEN LOOK user interface toolkit
written in Sun's NeWS, a multithreaded object oriented dialect of PostScript.
NeWS was a network extensible window system developed by James Gosling, after
he made Emacs and before he made Java.

Ben Stoltz came up with the idea for a "tatool" gui interface for ordering
pizzas from Tony & Albas pizzaria down the road in Mountain View, which he
implemented in XView using DevGUIde (Sun's GUI builder tool). It inspired me
to write Pizzatool for TnT in PostScript by hand -- I remember staying up late
at night writing snippets of PostScript code for each of the different pizza
toppings!

My initial version would draw a preview of the pizza on the screen, and then
fax the image over to the pizza parlor, which confused them a lot because they
couldn't tell which ingredients I wanted by looking at the black and white
halftone screen printed pizza picture. So the next version just printed text
describing the ingredients and delivery instructions, which took a lot less
time to fax and was a lot more readable than a halftone image.

There was a bit of a controversy internally at Sun about releasing and
supporting the source code, which toolkit to use (there were a lot of politics
surrounding that at the time), and unintentionally revealing Sun's secret
multimedia pizza faxing strategy to the press. But I wrote a manual entry,
disabled the email-to-fax feature, replaced it with a menacing pop-up
notification that threatened to hold your pizza hostage until you payed your
tab, and managed to ship it in Solaris/SVR4 as an OpenWindows/NeWS demo.

Andy Bechtolsheim used it as an example of Sun's multimedia strategy in a
SunWorld interview, and Unix Toady wrote an article about it, so the fallout
wasn't as bad as some people were afraid of.

[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool-
mail.t...](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool-mail.txt)

The idea was to test out and demonstrate how to program many of the dynamic
user interface widgets, menus, windows, and drag and drop techniques in TNT
2.0. For example, it forked off light weight threads to draw all your pizza
toppings at once, and you could spin the pizza to "cook" it by rotating the
pixels repeatedly, then drag and drop an image into the pizza to customize it!
It could even interoperate with another demo called "RasterRap". Here's a
video that demonstrates spinning pizzas and dragging and dropping images from
RasterRap into PizzaTool, which I recorded at the Exploratorium years ago
(PizzaTool demo starts at 21:40, and the white and red pizzatool icon is
visible at 13:00 -- it looks like a pizza box):

[http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/HyperLookDemo.mov](http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/HyperLookDemo.mov)

Demonstration of SimCity running under the HyperLook user interface
development system, based on NeWS PostScript. Includes a demonstration of
editing HyperLook graphics and user interfaces, the HyperLook Cellular
Automata Machine, and the HyperLook Happy Tool. Also shows The NeWS Toolkit
applications PizzaTool and RasterRap. HyperLook developed by Arthur van Hoff
and Don Hopkins at the Turing Institute. SimCity ported to Unix and HyperLook
by Don Hopkins. HyperLook Cellular Automata Machine, Happy Tool, The NeWS
Toolkit, PizzaTool and Raster Rap developed by Don Hopkins. Demonstration,
transcript and close captioning by Don Hopkins. Camera and interview by Abbe
Don. Taped at the San Francisco Exploratorium.

~~~
err4nt
Wow thanks so much for the background info, and thanks for giving me a peek
into the past! That makes a lot of sense about how it came about and what it
was trying to accomplish, knowing the restraints the software was written
under only makes the product you came up with more amazing!

The thing that strikes me the most about this whole thing is that your pizza
tool is essentially the same functionality as Domino’s online pizza builder
today—but it took the rest of the world a quarter century to recreate what you
had in 1990?! Sometimes I feel like the consumer software market has hit the
‘pause’ button on the computer revolution and stalled forward progress for
decades…learning about this tool backs that suspicion with proof. You were
active during the golden age of desktop software, this must have been such and
exciting time to be creating things.

“I would love to be able to order a pizza w/out all the hassles of talking to
a human. O:-) ” — Angela Thomas

AMEN! I Loved this quote from the email exchange : ) About to watch your video
now, can’t wait to see these ideas brought to life in motion.

Thanks again for the background info and links, feel free to send any further
replies to tomhodgins@gmail.com in case this HN thread gets lost. I’d love to
hear more about what you built since the pizza tool too, I’m fascinated!

------
07d046
At some point in the last ten years they added Google Analytics tracking to
the page.

~~~
runarb
Last modified Mon, 30 Dec 2013 if you use [http://web-
sniffer.net/](http://web-sniffer.net/) to look at the HTTP response header.

Looks like they not just still serving it, but have updated it at some point
in time also.

~~~
steamy
DOM is your friend :)

    
    
        document.lastModified;

~~~
hk__2
This DOM property is derived from the HTTP headers.
[http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/dom.html#dom-document-
lastmodifie...](http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/dom.html#dom-document-lastmodified)

------
bonaldi
Why does it have the fake browser chrome at the top? did it have that back in
the day as well?

~~~
gpvos
Probably not. See the wayback links from 1996 that others have posted.

------
ikillvampires
That's one fast load time.

~~~
gavinpc
It's 85% pagespeed score and 92% YSlow [0].

It's not valid, but it's responsive.

It has no jQuery dependency, but it uses Google Analytics.

It's insecure HTTP but a "trusted" hostname.

It's low contrast and navigable (inasmuch as there are no links).

Plus ca change...

[0]
[http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.pizzahut.com/7MCdOcHp](http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.pizzahut.com/7MCdOcHp)

------
Kiro
How come tags are always in uppercase on really old sites and why did the
transition to lowercase happen?

~~~
wangarific
My guess is that back in the day we'd be writing these pages in a plain text
editor and all caps made it easier to distinguish tags.

~~~
blakeja
I think that is most of it. Also, upper case was kind of like a virus back
then. When you went to write your first page, looked around at what everyone
else was doing, it was all caps so you did all caps.

------
Lorento
Very similar in 1996 on the wayback machine

[http://web.archive.org/web/19961219205128/http://www.pizzahu...](http://web.archive.org/web/19961219205128/http://www.pizzahut.com/)

Comment shows it was created in 1994

 __HTML index.html

 __

 __DESCRIPTION Home Page.

 __

 __REVISIONS

 __Date Who Comments

 __\---- --- --------

 __08 /18/94 SCO created.

 __

~~~
eddieroger
Normally when I end up on the Wayback Machine, I spend a few minutes lamenting
a web gone by, but for some reason I clicked around this one for a few
minutes. They have a really fascinating backstory (although short) as to how
the site got up and running, and discussing the first pizza delivered from the
web on the About page.

[http://web.archive.org/web/19970214123825/http://www.pizzahu...](http://web.archive.org/web/19970214123825/http://www.pizzahut.com/htdocs/team.html)

------
kiallmacinnes
I wonder how we'll do this kind of thing 10 years from now? Web pages have got
so complex, even simple blogs etc, that serving them without keeping the
infrastructure running is going to get harder and harder...

~~~
blfr
Scrape the website to html and css and toss that up anywhere. Every CMS can be
a static site generator if you want it to be.

~~~
kiallmacinnes
Sure, but many of these sites are taken down/replaced, and only years later
does nostalgia kick in... At that point, its too late to scrape the site!

~~~
525
That's why archive.org exists.

------
mixmastamyk
Ahhh... being the webmaster, brings back memories.

I do remember going to imdb in those days and making a screen shot to show my
relatives over xmas break. Haven't seen it in about 10 years though.

~~~
pan69
Ahhh... Using the term webmaster, brings back memories.

------
noir_lord
Santa Cruz Operation (thanks mahouse) aka SCO.

They used to run all the McDonalds stuff at one point iirc.

~~~
mahouse
Santa Cruz Operation*. It sounds like a warfare tactics thing, heh.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
You must have been a client, too. Brings back old memories.

Also, have a look at the Groklaw archives if you haven't:
[http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2006121221...](http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20061212211835541)

~~~
quesera
Wrong SCO.

Caldera renamed themselves The SCO Group after acquiring the name and
trademark from The Santa Cruz Operation in 2001.

Later, things went south and the new SCO(G) turned litigious. The original SCO
was not responsible for the later shenanigans, and it was painful to see their
name dragged through the mud.

See also: Cingular -> AT&T

~~~
maxerickson
Who is dragging what through the mud with Cingular and AT&T?

------
raverbashing
Its, not it's

~~~
nthcolumn
Its, not it's.

~~~
seanp2k2
TL;DR only use the apostrophe when you're saying "it is" or "it has". "Its" is
possessive even without the apostrophe.

More:
[http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/apostroph...](http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/apostrophe-
catastrophe-part-one)

------
bnastic
Wow, webmaster@... You don't see that email address often/ever anymore?

~~~
nashashmi
Back then everything web related was done by one person.

~~~
tokenizerrr
You could have a group inbox.

------
sedatk
with google analytics embedded, and actual form removed. so, deliberate.

------
jebblue
I think it's pretty cool that they keep the original page working. I prefer it
to the new page which has the modern day over-sized everything, over-sized
text boxes, etc. It would be a nice site if they sized the widgets down to
something that doesn't force me to scroll up and down constantly while
building my pizza.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
I've missed NCSA Mosaic so much. What a flashback! But do you guys remember
Trumpet Winsock?

~~~
SystemOut
Yeah, we're definitely old. I was working my first developer gig at a company
that had a commercial TCP/IP stack for Win 3.1+. Trumpet came up all the time
especially from customers that were trying to get a better deal.

Sort of a tangent but I still remember building a SOCKS client on top of
Winsock using undocumented Windows APIs. It was great that you could simply
ask Windows to alias your code segment register to look like a data segment
register and then replace the first 5 bytes of function calls to jump where
you wanted it to go. And DLLs were in the global space back then. So it
changed it for every app using that DLL. Those were fun days.

~~~
yuhong
Which also reminds me that MS made the decision to go to a flat address space
when designing OS/2 2.0 and "NT OS/2" in the late 1980s, ignoring the Morris
worm.

------
megablast
Looks the same with and without javascript, nice!

------
jmckib
Ironically, I feel like PizzaHut is now the most outdated of the pizza chains
when it comes to web technology. I've been working on a fun project where I
need to order pizza gift cards, and PizzaHut is the only chain that doesn't
integrate with any gift card APIs.

Also, Domino's is way ahead of them when it comes to actually ordering pizzas
online. Has anyone seen the Domino's pizza delivery tracker? It's awesome. It
actually makes delivery feel faster by breaking it into steps.

~~~
amccloud
What gift card api are you using?

~~~
jmckib
I've talked to a bunch of them about Pizza Hut, and none of them have it, but
I'm currently using TangoCard.

------
ptaipale
Just reminds me that in Helsinki University of Technology (hut.fi) we of
course had to have a host called "pizza": pizza.hut.fi

(Nowadays HUT is renamed Aalto University).

~~~
camperman
Yessssss! Didn't you guys have a mirror of the Amiga demoscene on that host?

~~~
ptaipale
I think it had various stuff, that might well have been one part of it.
Perhaps it ran Gopher before WWW servers were around? I don't really recall.

------
marincounty
When I ordered pizza, I was usually getting drunk, and just got a late call
from someone who wanted to drop by.

I knew we needed some grub for the upcoming night of debauchery.(Yea, I was
quite the charmer?)

Even now, I would rather have the original website, over the flashy current
one. Sometimes less is more? Do I want to make more than a few decisions when
ordering a pie--under the influence? I kind of liked calling--order--cash--bye
bye.

------
bluedino
I remember as a kid around 1995 or 1996 seeing a Unix login prompt on the
stores computers, and one guy who worked at a store had put some of the modem
dial-in numbers on a local BBS. We'd dial in and try to guess the passwords
but never got anywhere. Later I learned Pizza Hut ran RedHat.

~~~
k__
Lolwat?

Care to elaborate?

~~~
rylee
I believe you interpreted this as "Pizza Hut ran Red Hat" as in "Pizza Hut
owned Red Hat", but the poster meant it as "Pizza Hat ran Red Hat [Linux?] (on
their computers)."

~~~
k__
Thank you. I really did think that and even start to read the history of Red
Hat...

------
cleverjake
digging through the wayback machine, shows a slightly different version from
around this time (1996) -
[https://web.archive.org/web/19961219205128/http://www.pizzah...](https://web.archive.org/web/19961219205128/http://www.pizzahut.com/)

Thought this comment was particularly humorous, considering general the lack
of content

<!

 __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __

* *

* PIZZA HUT INC. *

* *

* PHI proprietary information: the enclosed materials contain *

* proprietary information of Pizza Hut Inc. and shall *

* not be disclosed in whole or in any part to any third party *

* or used by any person for any purpose, without written consent *

* of PHI. Duplication of any portion of these materials shall *

* include this legend. *

* *

 __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __
__ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __

 __

 __HTML index.html

 __

 __DESCRIPTION Home Page.

 __

 __REVISIONS

 __Date Who Comments

 __\---- --- --------

 __08 /18/94 SCO created.

 __

- >

------
emehrkay
Does anyone know how the delivery system worked? I assume that there were
people who received an email once the form was figured out and passed your
info to the local pizza hut

~~~
kayamon
I'd put money on there being a fax machine involved in this somewhere.

~~~
throwaway888709
I know that SCO was involved with many food franchises in the following way:
each location would run a PC with SCO Unix installed and a POS and reporting
app. Each nite the reports would be transmitted via satellite dish to HQ.

Very futuristic!

Somebody else will have to confirm if the online pizza orders were emailed to
each location automatically, sent via a Unix application, or faxed.

------
soheil
It's incredible how not much has changed in online pizza delivery. Fill in
your name, address and phone # and we deliver your pizza, there got to be a
better way.

~~~
orblivion
There's a pizza, it comes from a place, and goes to your place. What more
could there possibly be that wouldn't it more complicated?

~~~
Demiurge
TELEPATHIC QUADRACOPTERS

------
drhodes
for those curious about the icon in the upper right, google "ncsa mosaic"

------
jliptzin
Ah, the signature all-caps HTML tags of the 90s.

------
orblivion
So... did anybody try to order a pizza?

~~~
gummywormsyum
it's pizza hut ...ew

------
cJ0th
I like how it is just functional.

------
morenoh149
looks macintoshy

~~~
snsr
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT)

------
simonebrunozzi
The title says "PizzaHut still serves it's first Homepage". From the (British)
English grammar I studied in Italy, it should be "its" instead of "it's", and
I remember seeing a debate about it a while ago.

Can someone enlighten me? What's the right form?

~~~
lloydde
There is no debate. You are correct. "It's" always expands to "it is". I have
to tell myself this rule every day :(.

~~~
tr352
Or "it has".

------
aurora72
Well Pizzahut makes the most delicious pizzas and is the best managed fast
food company around. So they pay tribute to their past website, that's nice.

