Remembering Cyberia, the World's First Ever Cyber Cafe

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE: It's early on a Sunday morning in late 1994, and you're shuffling your way through Fitzrovia in Central London, bloodstream still rushing after a long night at Bagley's. The sun comes up as you come down. You navigate side streets that you know like the back of your hand. But your hand's stamped with a party logo. And your brain's kaput. Coffee... yes, coffee. Good idea. Suddenly, you find yourself outside a teal blue cafe. Walking in is like entering an alien world; rows of club kids, tech heads, and game developers sit in front of desktops, lost in the primitive version of some new reality. Tentacular cables hang from the ceiling. Ambient techno reverberates from wall to wall. Cigarette smoke fills the air.

Welcome to Cyberia, the world's first internet cafe. Which, if you're too young to remember, are basically cafes with computers in them. It all began when Eva Pascoe, a Polish computing student living in London, crossed paths with Tim Berners Lee and other early internet mavericks at the dawn of the 90s. 'I was very interested in cyberfeminism and wanted to figure out how women could reclaim tech,' she recalls. The internet was still in its infancy. Diabolically slow dial-up modems only emerged around 1992; the World Wide Web was a pipe dream until 1993 and hardly anyone had the internet at home. But there wasn't just a lack of javascript; Eva remembers there being no good java, either. 'There were no coffee shops in London,' she says, which today seems ludicrous. 'Just greasy spoons and everyone drank tea. I wanted a European-style cafe.'

Linking up with like-minded pioneers David Rowe and husband and wife Keith and Gene Teare, Eva found a spot on the corner of Whitfield Street and launched Cyberia there in 1994. With Hackers-style aesthetics and futuristic furniture, it was based around a U-shaped layout that meant visitors could see each other's screens. 'I wanted women to feel safe, because a lot of the stuff on the net was dodgy,' she explains. Many of Eva's mates chipped in to help out -- architects, interior designers, graphic artists, publishers, and ravers among them.

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. Back in London, Cyberia quickly became a hotspot. 'Virtually the second we opened, we had three lines deep around the block,' she says. It's hard to imagine, but nowhere else in the world was doing what they were doing. It was the world's first cybercafe. 'If you wanted to collect your emails, we were the only place in town,' Eva says. Cyberia opened around 20 cafes worldwide, including branches in Bangkok, Paris, and Rotterdam. 'For a fleeting moment it became like a sexier version of Richard Branson's Virgin empire: there was Cyberia Records, Cyberia Channel (a pioneering streaming service), Cyberia Payments, the Cyberia magazine, a Cyberia show on UK TV -- even a Cyberia wedding,' writes VICE's Kyle MacNeill. He attended Cyberia's 30th birthday party in September and spoke with some of the cafe's original innovators, 'shooting the shit about the good times and the not-so-good coffee.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.