It seems like a lifetime ago since we didn’t all have 24/7 access to the internet no matter where we are – and for those under the age of 20, it actually IS a lifetime ago.
Since the start of the new millennium, the percentage of people in the UK using the internet has risen from a little over 30 percent to 98 percent as of this year.
Those are astonishing statistics and a marker for both how far technology has come and the huge impact the online world has had on our society over the past 25 years.
But even in those far off days, long before smartphones and when only a third of us had internet access in the home, we were still regular users – you just had to know where your local web café was located.
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the internet café for many of us was a home from home, where we’d log on to check our zero new emails, ‘surf’ the web (who even says that anymore?) and blether absolute nonsense to randoms on some godforsaken chatroom.
Edinburgh was well ahead of the curve during the internet revolution, with the capital home to Scotland’s very first internet café, Cyberia on Hanover Street, which opened in 1995 – and it wouldn’t be the last.
Within a few short years, internet cafés were almost as common as actual cafés, with just about every district of the city having at least one.
But they weren’t exactly cheap. Most internet cafés charged a couple of quid an hour and you could easily rack up hefty costs – and that’s before you factor in the price of a few cups of coffee or print-outs. Kids today wouldn’t believe the lengths we had to go to just to ‘log on’ back then.
Nowadays, while you can still find the odd web café, they aren’t anywhere near as popular, with the vast majority of us connected to the net pretty much all the time with our smartphones and smart speakers.
We take a look at a handful Edinburgh internet cafés we used to use all the time in the pre-smartphone era.
Opened in April 1995 when fewer than two per cent of UK households had web access, Cyberia internet café in Hanover Street was the very first of its kind in Scotland.
The pioneering establishment, which was the brainchild of brothers Gavin and Douglas Nicholson, provided many Edinburgh locals with what would be their first time surfing the World Wide Web.
Opened shortly after Cyberia, the compact but cool Web 13 on Bread Street was every bit as popular as its city centre rival for a time. Run by entrepreneur Ian McCarron it closed in 2004, as home internet access began to soar.
With more than 400 terminals over multiple floors, Easy Everything on Rose Street was the largest internet café in Edinburgh and by some margin.
On busy days, the popular web access mecca, which opened in 2000, would be packed out by people of all ages eager to get connected and enter the digital age. And while speeds were slow compared with today, they were significantly faster than most locals had experienced before.
Another early Edinburgh internet café venture that opened in the 1990s was Electric Frog on Cockburn Street. The popular city centre haunt croaked its last in the early 2000s.
Occupying a prominent corner at Brougham Place, the cleverly-named Th:at internet café was the largest web café in the Tollcross area with over 50 computers on two floors.
