The First Pizza Ordered by Computer, 1974

By the late 1960s, tech­nol­o­gists were already invent­ing the future we now inhab­it. Arthur C. Clarke peered into the future and saw a wired world where infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion would be imme­di­ate and bor­der­less. Mar­shall McLuhan fore­saw the rough out­lines of what we now call “social media.” And oth­ers pre­dict­ed that email and ecom­merce were on the not-so-dis­tant hori­zon. It should per­haps then come as no sur­prise that, just a few years lat­er, The Arti­fi­cial Lan­guage Lab­o­ra­to­ry at Michi­gan State devel­oped a way for the com­put­er to start doing some every­day com­merce — like order­ing piz­za.

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. It all plays out above, and we hope that Mr. Mike’s is still thriv­ing all these years lat­er.…

via Coudal