It is part of the Saturday routine for many of us: a movie on Netflix, a pizza from our favorite pizzeria (ordered online, of course), and then relax, because we’ve earned it. However, thirty years ago, the reality was similar but not the same: you could watch a movie, yes, but at the video store. And eat pizza, of course, but by calling on the phone. The internet has made our lives easier, but not so long ago it was pure science fiction… until a movie got ahead of reality by a few months.
Double the @ symbols and a quarter of a trending topic
Although it is said that the first time someone ordered a pizza was in 1994, the truth is that we have to go back twenty years earlier, when a man with Moebius syndrome who could not communicate normally, Donald Sherman, used a proto-Internet to call a pizzeria with an artificial voice. Domino’s Pizza hung up immediately, but a classic neighborhood shop, Mr. Mike’s, accepted the order and sent it to his home. It did not cause a stir in any way, but it took a first step into history.
In the mid-90s, the Internet still seemed like an impossible future promise for most of the population, who didn’t even have computers. However, on July 28, 1995, just a month before the release of Windows 95, The Net, a movie starring Sandra Bullock that showed us the infinite capabilities of the Internet, premiered. You could be a hacker, surrounded by computer screens, uncover international conspiracies, and of course, order pizza.
To give you an idea of how lost the screenwriters (and the world) were 30 years ago, they needed the help of a specialist at UCLA (the University of California) to explain to them what the World Wide Web was, because they didn’t understand anything. It was he who told them that in the future everyone would have access to the Internet and could do all kinds of things. While they were filming, Time magazine released a legendary issue in which all the articles were about the Internet, and they thought that perhaps their little science fiction madness might have a connection to reality after all.
But, to show the greatness of what was to come, why ask for that particular food and not anything else? In the movie, we see how Sandra Bullock’s character logs onto pizza.net (yes), and the idea came from the director, Irwin Winkler, who asked, as a wacky thought, “What if you could order pizza over the Internet?”. The screenwriters didn’t understand anything: Why would anyone do that with a phone nearby? In the end, they accepted for a simple reason: the character is isolated and doesn’t want to talk to anyone, so she even (even!) orders her food online. What a fantasy, right?
Ordering food, the future
Although pizza.net (“We deliver the best pizza in cyberspace!”) now seems like a primitive page, at that time they designed it to be colorful and vibrant, as they imagined the websites of the future would be. They were not far off, of course. In fact, what is surprising is that the website’s interface (in 1994, think about that) was completely interactive, and Bullock could click anywhere, so he could murmur what he was doing while clicking here and there.
As a curiosity, a large pizza (20 inches), with regular crust -the other options were “thin and crispy” and “deep dish”- with garlic, anchovies, and extra cheese (a matter of taste) cost 14 dollars. Quite expensive for the time, but of course, after all, it was a cyberspace pizza. So far, so good. There is just one problem, and that is that, although it was ahead of its time in the filming, in real life Pizza Hut started testing the possibilities of ordering pizzas online as early as September 1994 through the service… PizzaNet. In the end, the Internet was not so far off.
That said, these pizzas could only be ordered if you had Internet in 1994 in the Santa Cruz area, a city in California with just under 60,000 people. The promoter was the owner of a store in the city who wanted to see what would happen if users were given the opportunity. However, there were no clickable options like in the movie: it was a form where you had to put your chosen pizza, address, and phone number. And, of course, pay at the door, no online payments. Of course, a couple of years later PizzaNet closed and paved the way for the first generation of online food.
Ah, that’s right! Don’t let them fool you: Pizza Hut was not the first sale that took place on the Internet. That was the album Ten Summoners’ Tales by Sting, which Phil Brandenburger from Philadelphia bought on CD with a credit card for $12.48 plus shipping costs. Who would have thought that the future would inevitably involve Sting and a slice of pizza?
