John Major was prime minister of Britain. The Internet, to most people, was like something out of the "Jetsons." "Latte" was Italian for "milk," not American for "coffee."
Ten years ago last Wednesday, Cafe Cyberia, billed as the world's first Internet cafe, opened in the West End of London. By most accounts, it drew a sleek crowd and a bit of skepticism.
Nevertheless, Cyberia has attracted plenty of imitators. Yahoo, the Internet portal company, estimates that 20,000 Internet cafes have opened in more than 100 countries since then. They serve business travelers, backpackers, people who cannot afford a home computer and those who simply want a latte.
While a few cafes and bars in other cities had offered limited online connectivity through the Well, an early online "bulletin board," Eva Pascoe, who founded Cafe Cyberia, said hers was the first public place to combine a commercial link to the Internet and a cup of espresso.
Pascoe was 29 and working on a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at the University of London when she set up the cafe for about ?20,000 ($35,500). Pascoe, who calls herself a "cyber-feminist," modeled Cafe Cyberia after a project in which she studied how women interacted with computers. Her goals was to encourage more women to become Internet-savvy.
"That's a business plan that didn't go very far," she said in an interview last week. "The first day we opened, there was a queue of men out the door."
Others, including Mick Jagger, joined the line of investors. Cyberia opened cafes in several Asian cities and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Like many entrepreneurs, Pascoe left the business. In 1998, she went on to other projects. About three years ago, the chain of Cyberia cafes was sold to South Korean investors who rebranded them under the name Be the Reds, or BTR, borrowing a cheer shouted by supporters of the Korean soccer team.
The London cafe now serves a mixed crowd of Korean exchange students and other neighborhood residents. On the ground floor, some surf the Web on the cafe's 50 Dell computers, check their e-mail messages, burn CDs or simply use the machines for word processing. They can choose from chilled drinks, snacks or just-add-hot-water meals.
Upstairs, customers take advantage of the high-speed connections -- roughly 1,000 times as fast as the dial-up modems of a decade ago -- to play Internet games. Downstairs, there is a bar.
"People come in to check their e-mail, find out there's karaoke and keep coming back," said Roger Park, who manages the cafe with help from a cousin, Jin Park.
Perhaps the biggest transformation has been in the business model. Internet cafes may have started as refuges for black-clad cyber-hipsters, but they quickly moved on to a bigger market. At the height of the Internet boom in 1999, the Greek-British entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou, founder of EasyJet, extended the Easy brand to Internet cafes, opening a huge shop near Victoria station here, followed by an even bigger, 500-computer version in Times Square in New York.
Haji-Ioannou has acknowledged that he overinvested in the business, which turned into a money-loser for his Easy Group. Though he said he had stanched most of the losses, the newest of the roughly 70 EasyInternet cafes are far from the original high-profile sites.
Now, they are generally franchised operations with a handful of computers in a McDonald's or Subway fast-food outlet.
Pascoe said she now checks her e-mail on a cell phone. But as she sipped a cappuccino at Be the Reds, on a visit for old time's sake, she said she did not think the rise of mobile Internet access would sound the death knell for Internet cafes.
"I thought eventually everyone would have a laptop, that this would be just a jumping-off point," she said. But she had overlooked another factor, she added: "In the early days, this was one of the only places in central London where you could get a decent cup of coffee."
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