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by mlac 1338 days ago
Fun story for ordering food: https://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/marthag/postscript/bur...
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Speaking of La Costeña's enormous burritos:

http://costena.com/famous.html

>On May 3rd, 1997 La Costeña of Mountain View, California created the world's largest burrito. The burrito weighed in at 4,456.3 pounds and was measured at 3,578 feet long. It was created at Rengstorff Park in Mountain View.

Also set that day was the world record for largest number of porta-potties filled. ;)

http://www.supersizedmeals.com/food/article.php/200604112036...

>World's Largest Burrito at Rengstorff Park

>Despite the hearty appetites of everyone involved, a substantial amount of food was left over. Soon people were filling enormous paper boxes with foot-long lengths destined for the freezer. A couple groups carried six-foot lengths like fire hoses to waiting pickup trucks.

One of Apple’s early LaserWriters had an Easter egg in ROM that faxed in an order for a burrito at a restaurant in (or near) Cupertino.

Details aren’t on the web, AFAIK. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13440422 mentions it was to print, but I think https://en.everybodywiki.com/Stump_the_Experts#Sample_Questi... is right that it faxed an order (that’s why the question included “fully equipped”; the fax part was optional)

A couple years before you could order burritos with Adobe's Fax enabled PostScript printers, I made PizzaTool use Sun's NeWS based "NeWSPrint" PostScript=>FAX gateway to order pizza from Tony and Alba's, and Sun Microsystems shipped PizzaTool with Solaris Unix SVR4. PizzaTool would actually fax a picture of the pizza with all its toppings, and let you preview it in color on the screen! As long as you're FAXing PostScript, why just use text, why not draw it on the screen in an interactive round spinning window too? (Try doing that in Display PostScript or Vim!)

The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool

How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...

FAXed order with PostScript pizza visualization:

https://miro.medium.com/max/720/1*EvKv1m2UbxuPJ1Mg9oGUqQ.png

NeWS PostScript Source Code:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt

Manual Entry:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6.txt

  % Fork a process to sprinkle a topping on the pizza in the background.
  %
  /StartSprinkle { % topping => -
    { % fork:
      gsave
       /PaintSetup self send
       /ClipCrust self send
       { % send to topping:
         clear /paint self send
       } exch send
       Sprinklers currentprocess undef
      grestore
    } fork
    Sprinklers exch dup put pop
  } def

  % Kill all the processes sprinkling toppings.
  %
  /StopSprinklers { % - => -
    [Sprinklers {pop} forall] {killprocess} forall
    Sprinklers cleanoutdict
  } def

  % Start spinning the pizza, to cook it.
  %
  /StartSpin { % - => -
    /StopSpin self send
    /SpinProcess { % fork:
      clear
      /PaintSetup self send
      /ClipCrust self send
      initmatrix
      { % loop:
        SpinPause { pause } repeat
        /Spin self send
      } loop
      SpinProcess currentprocess eq { % if:
        /SpinProcess unpromote
      } if
    } fork promote
  } def

  % Stop spinning the pizza, before eating it.
  %
  /StopSpin { % - => -
    SpinProcess null ne { % if:
      SpinProcess killprocess
      /SpinProcess unpromote
    } if
  } def

  % Spin the pizza around a bit.
  %
  /Spin { % - => -
    gsave
      /size self send         % w h
      2 div exch 2 div exch   % w/2 h/2
      2 copy translate
      SpinAngle random add rotate
      neg exch neg exch translate  %
      self imagecanvas
     grestore
  } def
> Solaris Unix SVR4

IIRC, PizzaTool was also available for OpenWindows on SunOS 4.1.1 or so, on `sun4c`.

PizzaTool was probably what inspired me to make the (much lesser) LunchTool, which was an XView UI to a database of lunch places near my employer. It printed snazzy formal invitation signs (using PostScript), for wherever the amorphous lunch group would be going that day.

(Learning PS by displaying on OpenWindows was much easier than huffing from a laser printer, and the Adobe blue and red PS books that Sun bundled were great.)

Previous HN discussion about "Ordering burritos from my SPARC (1992) (mit.edu)":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25897535

Is the "Barfing Boy" sculpture that was in front of Adobe headquarters on Shoreline Amphitheatre Parkway still there in front of what's now Google?

https://www.ilovemv.org/new-blog-1/category/public-art-tour3

I heard that the artist who they commissioned to create that sculpture assumed by the name of the road that it would be overlooking the shoreline, and meant it to represent a person leaning out of a window to enjoy the view, and they were dismayed that it was actually overlooking a garbage dump landfill, thus the "Barfing Boy" nickname.

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56a9576aa976af...

The rotting garbage underneath the lawn of Shoreline Amphitheatre generated methane that you could light for amusement during concerts.