Do yourself a favor. Do not watch the 1995 film The Net. It’s not only positively absurd, it’s not even that well acted. I saw it in the theater, at the time, and thought, these people have never seen the way the internet works. I guess, though, in retrospect, most people in 1995 hadn’t. But regardless, films like The Net, Hackers (which was released the same year) and Swordfish released in 2001 are the holy trinity of badly produced movies about computers. It’s clear that no one associated with any of these productions ever used a computer for any serious task. I mean, really obvious. And as I said, do yourself a favor and do not watch these films, except perhaps out of morbid curiosity.
One movie got one thing right
Right at the beginning of The Net, Sandra Bullock, whom no one would ever believe is a shut-in hacker, does something most people had never seen before: she orders pizza online. It’s said that this fictional event inspired real pizza companies to create online ordering. There are even urban legends about rich tech giants pouring money into the online pizza delivery system.
But those are just tall tales. The real fact is that online pizza delivery started before this movie came out. And it’s the internet, of course, that has preserved this important “slice” of history.
Pizzanet
According to the rather arrogantly named “thehistoryoftheweb.com,” the first true online pizza delivery service was created by Pizza Hut in 1994. It was a trial service and only available to people in Santa Cruz, California. It was just a trial run, a way to see if this sort of thing would work at all. Spoiler alert, it didn’t.
Pizza Hut itself confirmed this story during its 20th anniversary in 2014. This is an actual running archive of the very first pizza delivery web page. It predated The Net by a year. As I said though, it wasn’t an immediate success. Keep in mind in 1994, you would have had to boot up your computer, launch a browser, kick everyone else off the phone, dial a number, wait for it to connect, and then hopefully you could begin the process. That’s probably 10 minutes worth of work, compared to making a phone call.
That (technically) wasn’t the first time someone ordered a pizza with a computer.
Smithsonian tells a different story. They quote an article by OpenCulture which is no longer available, saying,
In 1974 Donald Sherman, whose speech was limited by a neurological disorder called Moebius Syndrome, used a new-fangled device designed by John Eulenberg to dial up a pizzeria. The first call went to Dominos, which hung up. They were apparently too busy becoming a behemoth. Mercifully, a humane pizzeria – Mr. Mike’s – took the call, and history was made.
Now, I have to imagine this was not truly online pizza ordering, it was just someone using computer assistance to place an order on a voice call. Does it count? Wellllll, I’m not so sure it does. I also have some doubts. Although there were 200 Dominos by 1978 (according, of course, to the internet) that’s a pretty small number. I don’t remember seeing one in my hometown until the 1980s.
Regardless, The Net made it cool.
I don’t think I ordered pizza over the internet until the 2010s. Maybe once or twice as a lark. But honestly, until smartphones took over the world, it seemed like most stores didn’t check online orders and you’d get there and the thing wouldn’t be ready. Now, of course, just like you I’d rather cut off a digit than talk to a human just to order a pizza.
It all goes to show how full-circle everything has become. In the 1990s, filmmakers envisioned a world where everyone could do everything with computers and portable devices. Now, it seems that with the current trend being to set every movie in the mid-to-late 20th century, all we can think about is a time when you couldn’t do anything with a computer or a portable device. Go figure.
