For what it's worth, there was an earlier "Cyber Cafe" just off the campus of Michigan State University in the early to mid-90s called Emerald City Cafe. They had 128k ISDN connections to MichNet/Merit by 1994 (when I started going there), and by late 1995 had 3MBit TCI Cable Modem connections.
It wasn't a nightclub-style cafe like the one in the article, but it was really cozy, open until 11:30pm weeknights (1am weekends), and had excellent coffee. Plus the next room over was an arcade / laundry. It's a bummer I can't find an article about it. Just good memories.
Looks like the Emerald City Cafe opened in May of 1995.[1] It is possible it was open at another location though, before moving to the Trowbridge address, since the business was incorporated back in May of 1992.[2] But I could only find the cafe connected to 1050 Trowbridge, so I'm not sure. Would probably have to go through more local newspapers to confirm.
Edit: But it doesn't look like Emerald City provided internet access when it first opened. An article from September of 1995 talks about how it's something the owner was working on.[3] Maybe your memory of going there in 1994 is off by a year?
[1] "In the Works," Lansing State Journal, April 8, 1995, 5B, https://imgur.com/a/emerald-city-cafe-JEE1zVx
[2] https://cofs.lara.state.mi.us/CorpWeb/CorpSearch/CorpSummary...
[3] "A Web with Your Coffee?" Lansing State Journal, September 1, 1995, 5B, https://imgur.com/a/web-with-coffee-VaQvQuA
I helped setup the computers at JavaNet here in Northampton, MA; I believe that was in 1995. At that time they were also a local dial-up provider, their cafe definitely a coffee shop and was also quite cozy.
https://web.archive.org/web/19970613071702/http://www.javane...
>And then there was the Amish community in Pennsylvania. Eva had to fly out there to negotiate for the “Cyberia.com” domain name they had bought. “It was a proper barn with horse carts and a wall of modems as they were running a bulletin board and an early ecommerce company. Apparently, there was always one family nominated to be the tech support,” she remembers.
That is one of the most profoundly interesting little tidbits of internet history I’ve ever seen
But....why did some Amish folks buy cyberia.com in 1994?
> "as they were running a bulletin board and an early ecommerce company."
Right...but I didn't realize they were allowed to do that.
“Allowed” is determined by The Elders of the community. Also, this does not go against the Amish ethos - they were not dependent on this for living. The day-to-day would have still been off-grid. Someone noticed they could make some extra money off The English and it was acceptable.
Ah, gotcha. Yea, it depends on the sect/group/'denomination'. Some are ultra-strict about electricity/tech, others have certain guidelines (i.e. keeping something like a landline in an entire different structure). It can vary even within the same county.
> It can vary even within the same county.
I went to a mennonite wedding once several years ago. One thing that I had no appreciation for before that was how splintered the overall community was. LOTS of tiny little "denominations" as you put it, eac based off of what seemed to this outsider as the most minor of differences. The wedding itself was a Big Deal in the larger community because it the bride & groom were from communities that normally were barely on speaking terms due to their faith differences.
I thought this was absolutely fascinating considering how the outside world barely understands the larger differences, like amish vs mennonite, and tends to lump the entirety of the Anabaptist community into a single bin.
It's always fascinated me how tenets of faith influence persistence of movements.
E.g. the far fewer adherents of religious sects that promote not having children vs those that promote not using birth control
The virality of various movements is often directly encoded in their scripture.
> A man poses with a mop on his head at Cyberia, the world’s first cyber cafe. This was very indicative of the humor of the times.
Oh. We're having to explain 90's humor as though on a museum placard.
I feel ancient.
One day we shall have to explain that no, wearing an onion on one's belt was never the fashion at the time.
But the 90s had many strange things, and I think I may never understand "wazzzzzzzzaaaaaaaaap" phone calls… or was that the early 00s?
And, having recently described the period as "around the turn of the century", I agree entirely with the sentiment.
The wazzap was mocking a trend of dudes greeting each other with "whassup" by elongating it ridiculously. Some of the appeal came from the execution and some from hitting just the right point in the zeitgeist.
Wazzzzzappp is easy. It was just a super bowl commercial that was popular
That origin doesn't tell me why it was popular.
Also, the ads were common in the UK where I was growing up, and the Superbowl was not as I recall broadcast on normal TV (we didn't have sky or cable, though that existed, so possibly that?), to the extent that I had to google the event to find out which sport the superbowl even was — I'd incorrectly guessed the other famous US sport of baseball, which is also not a big thing in the UK.
I don't think I've ever even noticed American Football being on UK TV at any point.
It was popular because it was funny. I think you will have a hard time ever finding a final "why" for social phenomena
It was a Bud Light ad campaign that originally ran for three years everywhere that Anheuser Busch ran ads. Wikipedia claims it started on Monday Night Football, not the Super Bowl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whassup%3F. But in any case, that is hardly the only time it ever ran.
Asking why it became popular may as well be asked of any pop cultural phenomenon that ever becomes popular. 20 people will give 40 opinions. Nobody really knows.
Yep, in the UK we knew it from the Budweiser adverts. Before that there was the frogs Bud, Weis, Er. Apparently they were originally a Superbowl ad, but again they were just shown on normal TV here.
don't fret, it wasn't funny then either. theyre just trying to exacerbate the delta T.
I came to a realization that such communities could only exist because one had to try to be a part of it, look for it, and actively participate to create a unique atmosphere. When things are too easy (look up and online event, buy a ticket, and just go), it doesn't signal commitment to the group you're a part of and culture doesn't stick around. Obviously there are billions of exceptions, but it might be hard to revive an environment like that nowadays.
It's the whole sense of nostalgic feelings that I've never lived through that bothers me while reading through the article, as I genuinely wish I could experience that in person...
There was an article in the Atlantic a bit ago arguing that a primary problem for the modern church - the reason why people were leaving - wasn’t because the church asked too much of them, but because it asked too little - that there was no cost to being a member, and therefore no sacrifice, and sacrifice is how we bind ourselves to a group or an idea. Caveats for organized religion and its merit all around, but the idea struck me as basically true and accords with what you’re saying: if you can assume or drop an identity as whims dictate, is it really an identity? Can you really belong to a group without making some kind of genuinely meaningful commitment? And, to your point, what are the ramifications for the modern internet world if not?
The Christ church expects people to give up their Sunday. This was a small sacrifice until people got disposable income to take their family to the beach or a theme park.
Sunday mornings didn't mean much in the year 1224 (what else were people going to do?) but they do in 2024.
I worked at Cyberia's second location in Kingston in 1995, before getting hired by Easynet to do tech support on the top floor of the building where Cyberia London was located. It was an interesting time! This article captured the energy pretty well - but there was a whole lot going on at Easynet as well at the time, too.
FWIW, I think the claim was always that Cyberia was The UK's first internet cafe. At least, that's what I've always said.
I worked at Cyberia's second location in Kingston in 1995
Wow, now there is a blast from the past! I hung out there quite a bit in 1995-1996. That was also the first place I used the actual internet (as opposed to BBS's or CompuServe), shortly after it opened. I can probably thank Cyberia for at least a small part of my future career success.
Very cool! I'm acquainted with Kingston but had no idea about that aspect of its history.
This NYT article from 2004 states that it's the world's first: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/02/business/worldbusiness/th...
There's also a stock image website with photos from the Kingston branch in 2001: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-internet-at-cyberia-cafe-k...
Hah, amazing! That brings back memories. The PC where the guy with the red t-shirt is sitting is where one regular used to come in and send out his erotic fanfic. He'd bring in a floppy disk that he'd set up at home and always seemed to have problems getting it to read - so we'd have to go over and help him out all the time.
I couldn't quite put my finger on the building you can see through the window. I managed to find an address for the cafe (48 High Street) and it clicked after I opened up streetview. It's the corner office block next to the mini roundabout on the High Street: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4075868,-0.3077591,3a,75y,96...
If you spin around in Streetview you can see the building that must have house Cyberia itself to the left of what is now Fillies Kingston. You can also cycle back in time to the earliest Streetview shots in 2008, at which time the cafe must already have closed down, and is next to a place called Bar Elvissa.
In case you're interested, my Googling also resulted in this brief conversation on Mastodon between other apparent previous frequenters of Cyberia Kingston: https://mastodon.social/@ade/109405408248074169
Hey, thanks for that Mastodon link. I think I remember at least one of those guys. I think that building over the road is nothing of note - just some generic commercial real estate.
Though they were indeed pioneers, a simple Wikipedia search rebukes the claim of "world's first cybercafe":
> In March 1988, the 'Electronic Café' was opened near Hongik University in Seoul.
> In July 1991, the SFnet Coffeehouse Network was opened in San Francisco.
> The concept of a café with full Internet access (and the name Cybercafé) was invented in early 1994 by Ivan Pope. [...] Over the weekend of March 12–13 in the theatre at the ICA, Pope ran a Cybercafé
> In June 1994, The Binary Café, Canada's first Internet café, opened in Toronto,
> Internet café called Cyberia opened on September 1, 1994, in London, England.
This also turns up in Serial Experiments Lain as the name of the café/nightclub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUO2jAiQb0g
Ye, SE Lain has lots of tech reference. This website lists many of them: https://www.cjas.org/~leng/lain.htm
That was the most prophetic and in my opinion, best anime to date about technology. They predicted SO much about today back in one of the most excellent short anime's of all time.
"Present day, heh, Present time, AHAHAHA"
Even the fansites are AWESOME: https://fauux.neocities.org/ (click "go visible", and keep clicking on lain)
Obviously one can argue about what counts as a "Cyber Café" but I was going online with my coffee at Muddy Waters in San Francisco before this. Anarcho-futurism FTW!
The Retro Hour podcast episode 387 has a great interview with Eva Pascoe a little while ago.
https://theretrohour.com/cyberia-cyber-cafe-eva-pascoe-ep387...
I was working in London in 1994 and remember visiting for the cultural experience but work provided a Sparc machine and ISDN at home as I was on call and it felt like slumming it to go to a cafe with a shared internet connection and PCs!
Amazing! My dad dragged me to the Cyberia cafe at a trip to London in 1995. It wasn't amazing compared to the LAN parties in Sweden I had experience from but in hindsight I realize it was something.
A year or 2 later we had internet cafes in Stockholm too.
I was born in 1993 but part of me wishes I was born earlier so I could experience the 90's as a young adult. Every time I read a story about the internet and general tech culture of the 90's, I see it as very new and chaotic but I also get super jealous that I was only 3-5 when all this went down.
I was born in 1984, and I feel incredibly lucky that I grew up at the tail end of BBS's and the start of the dialup era. Things were changing blindingly fast, but it was still small/niche enough that you still had a strong sense of community, hackers dominated, not companies, and we all had this feeling like we could do anything.
Even the broadband era was great, too. For me, it was the mid-2000s when everything really starting going off the rails (Facebook + iPhone, mostly).
Being born in 1981, the mid-2000s feel very weird to me too -- partly being in grad school in that time (and so somewhat isolated from the broader world) and yeah the rise of cell phones.
Born in 1988. Things were cool until around 2007, at that point everything great about the internet rapidly started dying off, though at first it seemed kind of exciting that it finally seemed to be getting global recognition, it was really the beginning of the end.
I was just a kid for most of the 2000s, but I was a user of the internet since way earlier than I should probably have been. Around that time is when I remember it kinda declining too, the forums that I frequented started getting closed down and my classmates uploaded photos with me in them to this newfangled "Facebook" thing, which horrified my "never say your real name on the internet" sensibilities.
If there's anything I have learned over my life, is that the idea that there was a previous exciting period that I missed out on -- even if it is true! -- is a surprisingly large impediment on finding the current exciting thing, and living to experience it. I spent a long time thinking I kept missing the boat, only to eventually shift my perspective so that I could spot the signs earlier, and find a similar boat that was just leaving.
In 1993, we didn't have closet laptops and old pocket supercomputers taking up space/up for grabs.
Computing was expensive. Communicating with a computer was even more expensive.
I was a kid with a BBS back then. I had parents who were very, very tolerant of an enormous phone bill, until that one time when I discovered the free-to-use-but-long-distance dial-up Internet service that was then known as cyberspace.org.
Shit changed a lot in my world when that four-digit phone bill showed up, and it stayed changed for quite a long time afterward.
The pre-WWW Internet did have some neat stuff going on, but meh. As much as I like to lament on the downfall of things like Usenet, I think we're in a much better spot for communicating and learning using these machines and networks than we were ~30 years ago.
(I do wish things were more local today, like BBSs usually were, but...)
It was a fairly limited subset of people who experienced any of this anyway. I made adulthood in the 90s and barely knew the Internet existed. My parents didn't get a computer with a modem until my senior year of high school and it was in the kitchen, shared with everyone else in the family, and couldn't be used online at the same time anyone was using the phone since it used the same line. It took six hours to download a single 400 x 400 pixel porn image.
On the other hand, when high speed connections separate from the phone line became a thing and vBulletin and phpBB and what not proliferated and there were a whole lot of still small but at least somewhat widely used and representative places to socialize online without corporate ad giants tracking your every move, for a few shining years, that was pretty nice. Maybe 1999 to 2005 or so. It was a pretty weird moment we'll never get again when I could meet multiple primetime television actresses on Internet dating sites, when any earlier, they wouldn't have been online at all, and any later, they'd have professional social media managers and would get inundated with so much spam they couldn't sift through it even if they wanted to.
For a very, very brief time, the Internet was reasonably widespread and used but also still kind of authentic and not completely poisoned by fully-automated crime and ad companies.
I downloaded (non porn) images over a 2400 modem in the old days. Was more like a half hour than six hours. May have been .gif which made it smaller.
I was a teenager in the early 90s. Yes, there were some great times like LAN parties with full PCs and a house full of your friends. The hacking culture was fun, because it was so new and not so commercialized yet.
However, you would probably be bored after an hour or two with the limitations on everything.
We could play a Doom, Warcraft, and Descent for days. Netwars in between for kicks.
Honestly the BBS / chat system scene of the late 80's / early 90s was way better, it was kind of sad that the Internet ultimately murdered it.
Even forums were good in the 2000s, before the masses centralized onto Reddit.
I miss the chronological discussion, instead of the echochamber Reddit's voting system encourages/enforces.
The thing I miss the most from forum is someone starting a discussion with a post of their own. Then other people replying, and those replies having the same hierarchical level. Sure, it was annoying to read people doing quote to quote but it felt more like people was discussing together instead of side by side.
Nowadays all we have (even here...) is the Slashdot discussion style that almost obligatory starts with a link to an external source, and hierarchical comments that segregates the discussion.
I miss forums where people had personalities. Here, we’re all just talking to Hackernews because there are too many users for there to be individuals. On phpbb forums, you could bounce arguments back and forth and come up with a model of how a person thinks, so you’d be able to understand what biases people are bringing in to things.
There were big boards like Something Awful, which did have enough users to become non-distinct. But that site was intentionally stupid and the context-free discussion was part of the joke.
Now, all online chat is context free, and we’re all shallow and stupid everywhere.
> On phpbb forums
It wasn't a phpbb thing, it's a size thing. It was basically every message board style format for all time before that too. Including any usenet group that was under a certain size, which was most of them.
Even on Something Awful, people had large custom avatars and signatures that made them more distinct (who remembers winampdb?) so you recognized prolific users, instead of a small, gray user name
I think that's not the issue, the issue it's the mandatory karma based sorting.
In Usenet you had threads as in Slashdot/Reddit, but on scoring you were on your own tastes.
There was a much stronger community aspect in those days. The locality helped. It was easier to meet your fellow nerds, living in the local calling area. I miss the BBS days.
Cyberia Rotterdam? Can't find any good info on that... Anyone here knows more about it?
great hit of nostalgia. i'm reminded of going to the library in NYC in the early 2000s to get on a computer to play rollerboy with about a dozen other kids doing the same thing
Related - @ cafe in new york city (1995-1996): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579969 > https://www.vox.com/2016/8/24/12593214/internet-cafe-history (2016)
Glad to know about this since I had never had the opportunity to go into a cyber cafe. I recall the first time I saw one, it was in the ending scene of the film The Beach (2000), and it looks very, very similar to the green one in Rotterdam.
Seems like the whole thing had very little to do with computers and a lot to do with partying and doing drugs. They keep giving the example of “checking email” over and over again as if that’s the only thing you can do with a computer
Welcome to the J.J's Cyberia world!
If you like to have some fun -
just get on the dancefloor
and screeeeam like this!
Nnnnnnnnyaaaah!> Diabolically slow dial-up modems only emerged around 1992
Wait, what?
I must have imagined having a modem in 1987? And using it to download games from the University of Michigan? Over the, well, Internet?
Wrong wording. I think they refer to "commercial dial-up Internet connections". The first ones appeared in 1992.
Non-commercial, educational/academic, research... connections were available earlier. :)
Someone had better go back to 1989 and tell that to world.std.com.
In 1989 The World was a BBS service. You can read the history in their own words here: https://theworld.com/world/about/history/our_version
> If someone wanted a file from the real internet one of us would dial into an account somewhere, download the file, and put it somewhere on The World they could access it. Yes, manually!
From your link:
> in October 1989 The World became the first service on the planet offering internet access to the general public for a modest fee, around $20/month.
I read yesterday the article "The First ISP" by Spike Ilacqua, in the February 1999 number of the "Usenix ;login:" magazine linked in Barry Shein's home page.
There Spike says that at the beginning they only had a UUCP server and they called servers to exchange files during the day (like a FIDONET node), and they got their real "Internet" ISP license in 1992, just two days before Sprint got theirs.
Is that what people would have called it back then? I don't remember using the term internet until much later. Back then, you dialed into the computer system you were trying to access. Dialing into an ISP that allowed you to connect to anything wasn't until later, at least in my part of the world. Once ISPs started sharing/peering with other networks was what I considered internet. The old way was essentially what we now replicate with VPNs to connect to a specific network via the internet. What was old is new again
Back then if the system you were dialing into was a university there was a good chance you could access the Internet.