“When the world’s first internet cafe, Cafe Cyberia, first opened its doors in London’s West End in September 1994, its founders could never have imagined what they’d unleashed.”
“Internet cafes — cheap, accessible venues where just about anyone could explore cyberspace in its infancy — spread slowly across the world at first, and then snowballed in popularity. In the spring of 1996, Sri Lanka got its first two internet cafes: the Cyber Cafe, and the Surf Board. A few months later, Kuwait’s first internet cafe launched with 16 PCs. In 1999, a travel guide promised readers a list of 2,000 cafes in 113 countries.”
“Within a couple years, it was estimated that there were more than 100 internet cafes in Ghana alone. BusyInternet opened the largest internet cafe in Accra, boasting 100 screens. By 2002, there were more than 200,000 licensed internet cafes in China, and still more operating under the table.”
More than just a place to access the Internet, they were places to hang out with other like minded enthusiasts from all walks of life and discuss tech.
My favorite memories growing up, a Buddhist monk in Laos who would come to the Internet cafe and hang out with us and anyway, between pirated copies of RM233 Windows 2000, UNIX subsystem for Windows, etc. he ended up getting a career as a Sysadmin. Internet cafe is where I discovered Slashdot in 1999 or so.
Pure technocratic bliss, they were a place of egalitarian freedom for everyone. The Internet was a technical wonder back then, and rather than wanting to impose limits, people wanted to see what it’s capabilities were.