>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
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!
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).
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
>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."
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!
> 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
don't fret, it wasn't funny then either. theyre just trying to exacerbate the delta T.
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.
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).
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.
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
> 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