In 1994, a Pizza Hut restaurant in Santa Cruz, California, began testing online ordering, becoming one of the first businesses to ever sell products over the internet. In 1994, when the World Wide Web was still in its infancy and most people had never purchased anything online, Pizza Hut was already exploring the future of internet-based food ordering. Through an experimental service called PizzaNet, a Pizza Hut restaurant in Santa Cruz, California, allowed customers to order pizza through a simple website. The process was basic by modern standards: users filled out an online form, the order was sent to the restaurant, and staff confirmed the details before preparing the food. Even so, the concept was years ahead of its time. This was long before smartphones, food-delivery apps, DoorDash, Uber Eats, or the convenience of one-tap ordering. At a time when many people didn’t even have email addresses, Pizza Hut was already testing the idea that meals could be ordered from a home computer. PizzaNet is widely regarded as the first major online ordering system launched by a restaurant chain and one of the earliest examples of consumer e-commerce on the web. The site appeared during the internet’s earliest commercial era, when only a few thousand websites existed worldwide. What feels routine today was groundbreaking in 1994: a major restaurant brand looking at the emerging internet and recognizing, years before the delivery-app revolution, that online ordering could eventually become part of everyday life.(Historic Vids)