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.
>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
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.
“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.
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 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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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
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
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.
https://www.cablevision.co.cr/review/1995/12.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_Network
>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.
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.
“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.
> 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.
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.
don't fret, it wasn't funny then either. theyre just trying to exacerbate the delta T.
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!
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!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Net
Hah! It wasn't "Internet" but it was "Cyber" indeed :D That looked great.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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 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.
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.
The guy at 2:45 in the video got it right.
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
> 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.
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