Today in 1955 Steve Jobs was born.
His biggest contributions to the tech world are well known; you may even be reading this right now on one of them.
But here’s a contribution that’s not as well known: Steve Jobs was also the first person to order a pizza on the internet.
This was back in 1996, back when the world was still imagining the possibilities of the internet.
According to the site AppStorey, a company called CyberSlice was trying to figure out how to use web forms to let someone order a pizza without picking up a phone or heading over to the local pizza place.
Now, step back for a minute and think about everything that goes into ordering a pizza on a website or through an app.
The site has to know who’s ordering the pizza, which place is making the pizza, what kind of pizza is it, how is the pizza is getting to the customer, how are they paying for the pizza?
And how do you keep all that information secure during the transaction?
CyberSlice had to figure out how to do all of that.
Fortunately, they had a computing partner that could help: NeXT Computer, led by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
The company’s engineers figured out a lot of the back end of pizza ordering, though it wasn’t quite like ordering a pizza through a delivery company today.
If a user ordered a pizza through CyberSlice’s website, Cyberslice would then have to order the pizza from the pizza company.
And that was often done through an automated phone system, since the pizza places themselves weren’t all online yet.
But it worked, and Steve Jobs himself was the one who showed it off.
In November 1996, he hosted an event for reporters.
He pulled up the CyberSlice form to order a pizza with tomato sauce and basil, and, sure enough, that’s what he got.
Jobs even predicted that the web would eventually become the number one way people ordered pizza, and that’s what eventually happened.
Though it wasn’t through that original portal.
CyberSlice didn’t become a titan of online pizza.
And a few months after placing his pizza order, Jobs went back to Apple, where he managed to do a few more memorable things.
This weekend in Anchorage, Alaska, the annual Outhouse Races.
These take place in the run-up to the famous Iditarod dog sled race.
But instead of hitching up their dog teams to a sled, participants build, well, an old school outhouse, mount it on skis, and then race it through downtown.
Do I want to know if racers take rest stops?
On a roll: At Alaska’s annual Outhouse Races, there’s no shame in being number two (Roadtrippers)
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Photo by Jeff via Flickr/Creative Commons