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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

> Back in the 80s and 90s people barely understood the internet let alone the idea of selling things on it.

Ironic was the movie "The Net" in 1995 with Sandra Bullock. The opening scene of her ordering pizza online was such a leap of faith for people at the time. The other interesting thing is how the movie basically predicted where we are now with all of our personal information online.

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Nice point. I recall vividly going to see The Net with a bunch of other CS students and we all laughed at the absurdity of it all. "Animation and sound on a web page? You've got to be kidding!" Sometimes you are too close to something to see the trend.

> The opening scene of her ordering pizza online was such a leap of faith for people at the time.

In 1994, when the Internet was opening to commercial use, someone gave a demo at my university of a pizza ordering system. I thought to myself it would never work, because all the stores would need to be wired up, and how was that going to happen?

I've been wrong about technology far, far more often than not.

The stores wouldn't even need to be wired up to the Internet. All they would need is a call center to dispatch pizza orders to the stores or a fax machine if they wanted to dispatch orders without a voice call, both mature, widely deployed tech at the time.

Yep, I later realized that flaw in my skepticism. In fact I had done some delivery from a store that used a call center, so it should have been obvious.

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