[LINK] "The Weird, Sketchy History of Internet Cafes"

[rfmcdonald]

Bryan Lufkin's extended history of the Internet cafe at Gizmodo was enlightening. I've taken advantage of them before, still do even: The one at Bloor and Dufferin I use as a print shop, when needed.

In the February 17, 1993 edition of the Washington Post, writer John Boudreau filed a story from San Francisco headlined “A Cuppa and a Computer: Coffeehouse Cyberpunks Seek Love and the Meaning of Life.”

Boudreau described how the bohemian cafes that birthed SF’s Beatnik scene had morphed into 20 nondescript coffee houses full of low tables with inlaid keyboards, where computers connected visitors to other coffee houses scattered in San Francisco and Berkeley. These places were part of a new communications network called SF Net, which provided an online (and real life) forum that connected everyone from “twenty-something slackers” to “physicists,” who rocked screen names like Warlock Scar and Ultra Crab. It was an era when the internet was still being described as an “electronic bulletin board.”

What did people do on SF Net? They flirted, they waxed existential, posted short stories, and role-played fake personas (the Post story mentions one regular who appeared as a 14th-century Pope).

SF Net was founded a year-and-a-half earlier, in 1991, by a 35-year-old San Franciscan named Wayne Gregori. At that time, the network serviced 900 regulars in the Bay Area—half of which were home subscribers, and half logged on at coffee houses, which charged fifty cents for eight minutes of computer use. They also provided plastic keyboard covers to shield keys from spilled cups of Joe.