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"Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not."
- Isaac Asimov

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

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