[HN Gopher] Remembering Cyberia, the first ever cyber cafe
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Remembering Cyberia, the first ever cyber cafe
Author : DamnInteresting
Score : 83 points
Date : 2024-11-22 23:10 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| Arubis wrote:
| > 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.
| technol0gic wrote:
| don't fret, it wasn't funny then either. theyre just trying to
| exacerbate the delta T.
| ben_w wrote:
| 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.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Wazzzzzappp is easy. It was just a super bowl commercial that
| was popular
| ben_w wrote:
| 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.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| It was popular because it was funny. I think you will
| have a hard time ever finding a final "why" for social
| phenomena
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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.
| volkk wrote:
| 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
| 0points wrote:
| 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.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| 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.
| empressplay wrote:
| 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.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| 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.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| jghn wrote:
| > 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| For sure, I was just using phpbb as an inaccurate
| shorthand for that general style and size of board,
| because they were the last group of boards around that
| size that were very popular.
| count wrote:
| Even HN and Reddit were like that Back In The Day...
| icedchai wrote:
| 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.
| nmfisher wrote:
| 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).
| kisonecat wrote:
| 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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...)
| dannyobrien wrote:
| 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.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| 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.
| billy99k wrote:
| 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.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| We could play a Doom, Warcraft, and Descent for days. Netwars
| in between for kicks.
| empressplay wrote:
| > 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?
| tecleandor wrote:
| 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. :)
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Someone had better go back to 1989 and tell that to
| world.std.com.
| 0points wrote:
| 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!
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Wargames, 1983. With the acoustic coupler. :D
| biztos wrote:
| Obviously one can argue about what counts as a "Cyber Cafe" 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
| tecleandor wrote:
| Hah! It wasn't "Internet" but it was "Cyber" indeed :D That
| looked great.
| Gollapalli wrote:
| >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
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| But....why did some Amish folks buy cyberia.com in 1994?
| whtsthmttrmn wrote:
| > "as they were running a bulletin board and an early
| ecommerce company."
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Right...but I didn't realize they were allowed to do that.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| "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.
| whtsthmttrmn wrote:
| 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.
| jghn wrote:
| > 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.
| nickt wrote:
| 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!
| seltzered_ wrote:
| 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)
| vallismortis wrote:
| 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
| cmiles74 wrote:
| 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...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Northampton, MA has to be one of the coziest places in the
| world, in general.
| garciansmith wrote:
| 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
| pliuchkin wrote:
| 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.
| yazzku wrote:
| The guy at 2:45 in the video got it right.
| philipov wrote:
| 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!
| Lammy wrote:
| This also turns up in Serial Experiments Lain as the name of the
| cafe/nightclub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUO2jAiQb0g
| larme wrote:
| Ye, SE Lain has lots of tech reference. This website lists many
| of them: https://www.cjas.org/~leng/lain.htm
| jcarrano wrote:
| Though they were indeed pioneers, a simple Wikipedia search
| rebukes the claim of "world's first cybercafe":
|
| > In March 1988, the 'Electronic Cafe' was opened near Hongik
| University in Seoul.
|
| > In July 1991, the SFnet Coffeehouse Network was opened in San
| Francisco.
|
| > The concept of a cafe with full Internet access (and the name
| Cybercafe) was invented in early 1994 by Ivan Pope. [...] Over
| the weekend of March 12-13 in the theatre at the ICA, Pope ran a
| Cybercafe
|
| > In June 1994, The Binary Cafe, Canada's first Internet cafe,
| opened in Toronto,
|
| > Internet cafe called Cyberia opened on September 1, 1994, in
| London, England.
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(page generated 2024-11-26 23:00 UTC)