I lived just around the corner when Cyberia, definitely the UK’s and possibly the world’s first ever internet café, opened in 1994. (Naturally, a couple other places have since put in claims they opened first.)

Reading an article today about the founding of Cyberia, I saw this:

And then there was the Amish community in Pennsylvania. Eva had to fly out there to negotiate for the “Cyberia.com” domain name they had bought. “It was a proper barn with horse carts and a wall of modems as they were running a bulletin board and an early ecommerce company. Apparently, there was always one family nominated to be the tech support,” she remembers.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/worlds-first-ever-cyber-cafe-cyberia-london/

  • LillyPip@lemmy.caEnglish
    12·
    11 hours ago

    I’m interested to know if this was the case.

    Totally secondhand info, but I used to have an ex-Amish friend who told me they often have a small shared outbuilding at the edge of their community that has a phone and a computer with Internet they can use in emergencies. She said some in the community were more liberal about the word ‘emergency’ than others.

    (I’m a doofus who literally typed out ‘can any Amish on Lemmy confirm this’ then deleted it, though, so take my words with some salt.)