
The hippest internet cafe of 1995 [video] - shifte
http://www.vox.com/2016/8/24/12593214/internet-cafe-history
======
dharma1
[https://vimeo.com/154959544](https://vimeo.com/154959544)

My uncle used to run this back in 1993 in Helsinki. Good times. Love the hair
styles and the jungle soundtrack. Coming from BBS's, the web and IRC blew my
mind.

I wish I could find my old geocities page now. I'm sure it had a few
transparent gif explosions on it.

~~~
huskyr
This is wonderful. Thanks so much for sharing this!

------
OskarS
I wanna feel superior about how none of those television people knew how to
pronounce @, but to be honest I didn't know that in 1995 either.

To be fair, I was 9 and didn't know any other words in English either.

~~~
cyberferret
It's a bit like how a lot of people refer to '#' as 'hashtag' these days,
without knowing about 'the pound symbol' or 'sharp' (if you are a musician).
:)

~~~
justinlardinois
It's a different symbol than the sharp, and I don't blame anyone for not
knowing it's rarely used for that purpose these days.

I had a web design professor who said its "true" name was _octothorpe_ , and
while various sources confirm that, I've never heard anyone else call it that.
Another student in the same class once called it the "tic tac toe symbol."

~~~
cyberferret
> It's a different symbol than the sharp

Ok, the true pedants can tilt their head a little to see the difference
between a # and a [Edit: Hmm it seems HN doesn't support pasting of extended
characters such as the musical 'sharp'?!?]...

I will have to change the pronunciation in my C# programming books to 'C-hash'
instead of 'C-sharp'... :)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Most books I've seen use C rather than C#. Bad editor if they don't.

~~~
mikestew
But I'm guessing that you've figured out after reading your own comment that
the musical sharp symbol is not rendered in all mediums (including HN). Were I
required to search for reference material related to Microsoft's C-like
language using proper typography, I'd have to go cut-and-paste the symbol from
a WikiPedia page because I don't know how to get it from keyboard to textfield
otherwise.

IMO, yeah, maybe not the best choice by MSFT. But pragmatically, we all know
what "#" means in that context even if it's not correct. All the Monday-
morning-quarterbacking in the world isn't going to change that. So I'm as all
for an academic discussion as the next person, but that's all it is.

------
cyberferret
I remember thinking 'how quaint' while watching that, then suddenly realising
that it all happened only a year before I started my current software
consulting business!

Interesting to see that T1 was quite expensive back then even in NYC. I
clearly remember in 1996 getting one of the first ISDN connections in the
country - $1000/month for a whopping 128KB connection in the days of 33.6KB
dial up. Ah, the memories...

------
Kenji
_They didn’t plan for ventilation for all the hardware, so they cooled the
server room with a garbage can full of ice!_

In the video, he said they had no money for it, but that is quite possibly the
most expensive way to cool a server.

~~~
Fripplebubby
Sounds like they had a restaurant-grade ice maker already, so it may not have
been any further sunk cost to get the ice. Probably lost some of that in
electricity and water bills!

~~~
Kenji
I think you underestimate how much energy it takes to cool down and freeze
water and how inefficient it is to simply place that near the server.

~~~
reitoei
Second-hand story from 20 years ago man... who cares?

~~~
Kenji
Me. Someone is _wrong_ on the internet and I am _right_!

Yes, that was a joke ;)

------
rdl
My favorite Internet cafe of old was "EasyEverything" (from the EasyJet guy)
-- huge cafes and great PXEboot resetting machines, so they were relatively
free of malware. Pretty far ahead of its time.

------
trav4225
The memory this sparked in me was of the great old Speakeasy cafe in Seattle,
which opened circa '94/'95:

[http://www.historylink.org/File/3300](http://www.historylink.org/File/3300)

~~~
spudlyo
I really miss the Speakeasy, I saw some wonderful shows there and made many
great friends there.

Some friends and I worked on the original Speakeasy RAIN (Remote Access
Internet Node) servers that were essentially a 486 host that booted Linux off
of a floppy disk. We installed 4/8 port Cyclades serial cards and attached
recycled Wyse dumb terminals to them. The attached modem dialed back to the
Speakeasy mothership and allowed users in Seattle to read their email from
places like The Alibi Room, the Sit & Spin, and Cafe Allegro. We processed
credit cards so non Speakeasy users could use the system, and when their time
was up we utilized a hacked up version of GNU Screen to pop open a text window
to let them agree to pay for more time or to disconnect.

It was a pretty sweet setup, I remember remotely upgrading the "firmware" on
the RAIN nodes by scping the new tomsrtbt disk image to /dev/fd0 and then
rebooting. Those were the days. It's hard to imagine Seattle hipsters happily
camped out on old dumb terminals in bars and cafes using Lynx to surf the web,
and Pine to read their email, but it happened.

~~~
trav4225
I remember the RAIN network! I also remember the lovely spray-painted recycled
Wyse terminals that were installed locally at the Speakeasy itself. Those were
all I used -- I didn't bother with the PCs they had there.

I never lived in Seattle, but every time I visited (from California) I made it
a point to stop by the Speakeasy nearly every day... and sometimes in the
evening as well to take in a show. It's fun to hear from someone like yourself
who was involved in the magic!

------
modoc
The CyberSmith Cafe in Harvard Square was pretty epic! VR rigs, specially
designed ceiling mounted downward firing speaker setups so you could hear full
stereo for your game while your neighbor heard his and not yours, ordering
food/drink from the computer, and so on.

[http://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/03/business/waiter-oh-
waiter-...](http://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/03/business/waiter-oh-waiter-
excuuuse-me-but-there-s-a-mouse-in-my-coffee.html)

------
gardano
Watching this made me nostalgic for world.std.com, in Boston -- that was many
folks' first dialup ISP.

------
torgoguys
They paid $9k/month for a T1 in 1995, in NYC? Sounds very high. Either that or
my reference point of paying $3k/month for a full T1 in 1994 in a small
Wisconsin city is low.

Anybody have more numbers from that era?

------
ChrisArchitect
I thought the hippest spot in '95 was Cyberdelia
[http://cyberdelianyc.tumblr.com/](http://cyberdelianyc.tumblr.com/)

