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"Retire? Yeah, I want to die with my head in the typewriter. That's my idea of retirement."
- Alfred Bester
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| Smart Pizza Box | ||
| A container with microprocessor-based data processing capabilities built-in to the box. |
Every aspect of the CosaNostra Pizza business has been optimized. Gone are the cheap cardboard boxes - how can you tell anything about the history of your order? If you've been guaranteed a pizza in thirty minutes, a guarantee that states that the company CEO (Uncle Enzo) will personally fly to your crummy little house to apologize, you need a box you can trust, a box with a smart microprocessor running a computer read-out and a time-stamp.
| The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator's head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator's car. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box's builtin RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down. |
| Technovelgy from Snow Crash,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by Bantam in 1992 Additional resources -
|
That's right; when you join the organization, you become part of the family. " A really scary, twisted, abusive family."
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Snow Crash
More Ideas
and Technology by Neal Stephenson
Tech news articles related to Snow Crash
Tech news articles related to works by Neal Stephenson
Smart Pizza Box-related
news articles:
- Pizza Computer Is One Smart Box
- Green Box 'Futuristic' Pizza Box
| Is There A Subterranean Ocean? |
| The Robotic Shopping Cart Of The Future |
| Arctic Resource Jackpot An Old Wish |
| Marie Curie's Papers Still Radioactive |
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'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
'Midges have many capabilities. To the untrained eye, they look like sparrows.'
'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
'It sounds to me as though you had invented a kind of metal earthworm.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable.'
'The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe- like independence.'
