UberEats is maybe a good confirmation of this. Their interface for options like toppings is pretty shit, but nobody seems to care. They just figure it out.
Tony and Alba's Pizza in Mountain View had various specials with discounted prices like "Ala Gilroy" with pepperoni, garlic, jalapenos, and bacon, and then you could add extra individual toppings on any pizza at a flat rate. (Their menu and pricing model may have changed since 1990.)
Ben Stoltz's original DevGuide/XView/X11 version of PizzaTool and also my TNT/NeWS version both had pizza order optimizers, so if you put together a basic "Cheese" pizza with individual toppings clams, pepperoni, garlic, jalapenos, and bacon, it would optimize it to an "Ala Gilroy" with extra clams, which saved you money.
There was nothing special users had to do (or even know about) to optimize the order: You could just select a pre-configured style or basic "Cheese" from the style drop-down, then click on and off the checkboxes to toggle toppings, and it would automatically reselect the most efficient base pizza style in the style drop-down, to automatically minimize the price.
Date: Tue, 28 May 91 19:25:45 PDT
From: Paul Simons
To: UNIX Today
Subject: Pizzatool
4/29/91
Editor UNIX Today:
We the following Sun engineers would like to make a historical clarification regarding the article entitled, “Any Way You Slice It, Sun’s Pizzatool Is Food For Thought” in the April 15 issue of UNIX Today. The original idea of ordering food from the workstation was conceived way back in 1989 by David LaValle who is now at NeXT. The original fully functional implementation of ordering food thru the workstation was “Pizzatool” developed by Ben Stoltz using Sun’s DevGuide. The features that were present in that original version included price optimization, pop-up preconfigured pizza menu, fully selectable ingredients, as well as the fax hook-in to fax an order to Tony and Alba’s. Fax capability courteousy of Ed Un. Don Hopkins subsequently reimplemented this original version of pizzatool in PostScript for the NeWS toolkit and added the WYSIWYG spinning popup pizza which provided a preview of the final cooked pizza.
This letter in no way represents the views, product plans, or announcements of Sun Microsystems and is only the opinions of the engineers who witnessed this historic event. :-)
Sean English,
Dave Evans,
Don Hopkins,
Paul Simons,
Ben Stoltz,
Ed Un.
Any Way You Slice It, Sun's PizzaTool Is Food For Thought
>And in yet another advancement for the free exchange of software, Sun is offering PizzaTool source without charge. [...]
>He said the PizzaTool even has a built-in cost-cutting feature that allows it to chec prices of the toppings you have selected, and try to build a cheaper pizza using a price list from your local pizza parlor. In its current incarnation, the PizzaTool will take an order and send it
via E-mail to an address on the Pizza Server. At Sun, the server then sends a fax order to Tony and Alba's pizza place in Mountain View.
