Steve Jobs. That's a name that we've all heard of.
You probably know him as the co-founder of Apple,
the founder of NeXT and the former chairman and CEO of Pixar.
But a lesser known fact about Jobs is that he was also the guy who placed one of the earliest online
pizza delivery orders, and his company even provided the technology to power the website that made it all happen.
Yeah, I didn't know about that last one until a while ago, but it's a pretty interesting story.
So, let's get into it.
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Nowadays, ordering a pizza online is something that you don't think much about.
Go to your favorite pizzeria's website or mobile app, find what you want,
place the order, and wait for it to show up at your door.
It's convenient, it's efficient and it's simple.
And food delivery services like Grubhub and DoorDash have made it even more appealing,
and have enabled those smaller local shops who may not have an online ordering system or mobile app
to easily fulfill these orders with very little overhead.
But in the mid 90's, ordering a pizza from your computer was something that you would see in a science fiction movie.
It was a pretty futuristic concept.
Remember, at this time, the web was still at its infancy, and it's estimated that only around 14% of american
adults had access to the internet in 1995.
But it didn't take very long for some to realize the potential of the World Wide Web,
with respect to food ordering and delivery.
The first company to establish a website for ordering pizza online was actually Pizza Hut,
who, in 1994, via a partnership with the Santa Cruz Operation software company,
launched PizzaNet.
For the very first time, users of the World Wide Web could place an order for a pizza right from their computer.
But this was more of an experiment, or a "pilot program", as it was only available in select Santa Cruz, California area Pizza Hut restaurants.
Despite the website's simple appearance, there was a lot going on on the back end.
On the site, you had access to a menu and three text boxes to fill out your name, delivery address and phone number.
Once you've placed your order it would be sent to a server in Kansas, where Pizza Hut was based at the time.
From there, it would be sent to the Pizza Hut restaurant in Santa Cruz.
The restaurant was outfitted with an internet connection that was used specifically for the online ordering service.
Once received, an employee would call the provided phone number to verify the costumer's order,
to prevent any abuse of the system.
Upon verification, your order would be processed and then delivered to you.
Now, this may have been feasible for larger chain restaurants, but it was virtually impossible
for those local pizzerias due to the high overhead cost.
Plus, it didn't really provide any increase convenience to the customer.
Sure, they could place the order online, but they would still have to wait around for a phone call from Pizza Hut.
So, why not just place the order by phone in the first place?
Again, this was only a test run of a concept, and it was not implemented in Pizza Hut locations outside of the Santa Cruz area.
But a couple years later, a website would launch that took online pizza ordering to the next level.
A service that allowed smaller restaurants to have the same online presence as large chains.
It was known as CyberSlice.
And believe it or not, the inspiration for this website came from a fictional movie.
The 1995 action thriller film The Net.
On July 28th, 1995, the world was introduced to The Net. A film starring Sandra Bullock as a computer systems
analyst named Angela Bennett.
I'm not going to discuss the entire plot of the movie here, but interestingly it showcases web based activities
that are pretty commonplace today.
Bennett telecommuted to her job, meaning that she worked from home.
and much of the interaction between certain characters in the movie takes place through online chat rooms.
Now, these things were not unheard of in 1995, but they were certainly not as commonplace as they are today.
But something that was relatively new, especially if you lived outside of Santa Cruz,
was the concept of ordering a pizza online, which Bennett does in the opening scene using a service called Pizza.net.
And for Tim Glass, this scene really stuck.
He was unable to find a company that offered a service like this, aside from Pizza Hut.
But again, this was in a very limited sense.
So one year later, in 1996, Glass, along with Jim Brimhall and Bryan Cupps, launched CyberSlice.
A company with a goal of making online pizza ordering mainstream.
And they didn't waste any time. In December of that year, a press release was put out announcing the service,
with a pretty influential person backing the venture.
You see, CyberSlice utilized WebObjects, an object oriented web application framework created by Steve Jobs's NeXT software company.
NeXT was already very groundbreaking in the realm of the World Wide Web.
Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web and the first web browser on a NeXT computer.
And, although their products were not intended to be used by everyday consumers,
WebObjects was popular in the corporate world. Especially during the early days of the web.
And it provided CyberSlice with a powerful framework to build their service on top of.
In the initial press release, Jobs backed the new company by saying:
From a business standpoint, the CyberSlice partnership was a great way for NeXT to showcase the power and versatility of WebObjects.
But Steve Jobs personally liked the service and thought that the company had great potential.
At an event in 1996, Jobs approached Bryan Cupps, one of the company's co-founders. As Cupps recalled in an interview:
Now, Jobs had a reputation for being an extreme perfectionist, who was not afraid to completely trash on somebody's work over the most minor details.
So, this was very surprising. Cupps then said:
In fact, Jobs liked CyberSlice so much that he agreed to demonstrate it publicly,
and become the service's very first customer.
Known for his very strict diet, he opted to get a cheeseless pizza with only tomato sauce and basil.
So, how did CyberSlice work? And what made it so different from the Pizza Hut implementation two years prior?
Well, it all starts at the website, which is much more graphical and interactive than the Pizza Hut site.
The service launched with support for around 1,000 pizza restaurants, located in four major US cities.
San Francisco, New York City, Seattle and Boston.
You would start by typing in your delivery address.
CyberSlice utilized MapQuest to pinpoint restaurants near your address that could deliver to you.
And since the site was powered by WebObjects, a unique webpage showing these restaurants
would be created on the fly and displayed to you.
Then you just have to choose the restaurant you wanna order from.
Each restaurant got their own page on CyberSlice that displayed their menu, hours of operation and what payment types were accepted.
One of the really innovative things about CyberSlice is that, similar to the food delivery apps of today,
the pizza restaurants did not need to have their own online ordering system.
In fact, they didn't need to have an internet connection or even a computer at all.
Soon after an order was placed on the site, a phone call would be made to the restaurant that you ordered from.
CyberSlice used an automated phone system powered by Apex Voice Communications to read the customer's order to an employee.
Each restaurant partnered with CyberSlice received a reference card with instructions on how to take the order,
have information repeated, and even decline the order if necessary.
Once the employee pressed 1, a robotic voice would read the customer's order and state the delivery address.
The employee would then tell the CyberSlice system how long the order would take to process,
by dialing the amount of minutes required, for example, 30, followed by the # key.
CyberSlice would then notify the customer of the wait time, and the pizza restaurant would process the order
just like any other one placed by phone.
And all of this was entirely automated.
And enabled the smallest of pizza shops to have the same amount of online presence as the big guys.
It's a great, real world example of what Steve Jobs was talking about when he said:
Another thing that made CyberSlice really attractive to customers is that it was completely free to use!
CyberSlice made money by charging the restaurants a small fee for each order placed,
which would be anywhere from 50 cents to a few dollars.
Very similar to how food delivery apps work today, except they also charge the customer an additional fee.
And, while these fees can definitely add up over time, it still provided the restaurants with an immense value.
Keep in mind that CyberSlice set up an entire webpage for each of the restaurants and didn't charge them anything to maintain it.
The only thing the restaurants had to do was train their employees to interact with the automated phone system.
So for pizza restaurants that wanted a fast, easy and low-cost way to get online, CyberSlice was it.
Just over two weeks after the initial press release, Apple announced their intentions to purchase NeXT,
and Steve Jobs came along with the company, eventually becoming Apple's new CEO.
As for CyberSlice, they gradually expanded their operation, eventually changing their name to Cybermeals,
implementing the CyberSlice concept at restaurants of all types.
Later on, they acquired the Food.com domain name and rebranded the company around it,
becoming Food.com, Inc. in 1999.
That same year, the company was issued a patent for their online ordering system, titled "Internet Online Order Method and Apparatus".
But the Food.com website would only be around for a few years afterwards, as the domain was purchased by The Food Network in the mid 2000's,
who is its present day owner.
The company later rebranded themselves once again to GeoComm Systems.
At this point, their primary business was selling their retail ordering system directly to restaurants.
It was also under a completely different management team, as none of the three co-founders worked there.
According to Tim Glass's LinkedIn page, the company was bought out by Accel Partners in the late 90's.
So, that is the story of CyberSlice. And that's how Steve Jobs made history by being the service's very first customer.
Although he wasn't directly involved with CyberSlice, his company developed the tools that helped power it,
and his public support of the company helped to promote it and get the name out there.
And according to Bryan Cupps, Steve Jobs even helped to get CyberSlice's technology archived at the Smithsonian Institution.
And even though CyberSlice is probably long forgotten by most,
its impact can still be felt today in food ordering apps like DoorDash and Grubhub.
So the next time you perform the seemingly mundane task of ordering a pizza online or through an app,
just think of the incredible amount of innovation that was required to make it possible.
Innovation that started over two decades ago, with the launch of a service inspired by a Sandra Bullock movie,
and publicly supported by Steve Jobs.
That's all for today's video.
I wanna thank you all very much for watching.
If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like and get subscribed,
and as always, I will see you all in the next video.
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