Did you have email in 1995? We kind of did. But we hadn't yet set foot in an internet cafe. Behold this video from PBS's Computer Chronicles that takes us to pioneering cyber cafe the Icon Byte Bar & Grill, which stood at 9th and Folsom in the space where Azucar Lounge is now. At the time, host Stewart Cheifet was trying to make the case that not all cyber-surfers were "anti-social geeks." In fact, we bet some people were just there looking for porn!
Per the NYT: "At the Icon Byte Bar and Grill in San Francisco... patrons inhabit a 'digital forest' made of sculptures and computer-generated paintings as they tap away on a Macintosh Quadra."
And then, if you keep watching, they get into some really tedious crap that used to exist like Usenet Newsgroups, and AnArchie, and early piece of FTP software that allowed people to find other "Macintosh archives" around the world.
Ugh.
