"It's all pretty amazing and confusing, if you're one of those who can't tell a disk drive from a motherboard!" That's the brilliant copy in this segment from ABC's Prime Time Live circa 1993, when anchor Sam Donaldson introduces us to the wonders of the brand-new internet. They start with a couple who met online, and the reporter's shock and awe when he finds out that "Guys use pick-up lines... on the computer?!" is really charming.
But at the 3:10 mark, they come to San Francisco to discuss the concept of a cyber cafe, filming at the Horseshoe Coffee House which Hoodline explains was at 566 Haight, across from the Toronado, now the location of the Laundry Locker. At the time it "cater[ed] to the tie-dyed teens of the Haight-Ashbury," and there were so few people online at the time that the kids chatting in those chat rooms were just talking to the techies of the time who worked at Jumpin Java or other cafes because hardly anyone had modems at home. And you'll see they bought internet time by the quarter, and one teen talks about how she once spent $10 in quarters because she just couldn't stop chatting.
It would be another two years before PBS discovered SF's internet cafes, visiting Icon Byte Cafe in SoMa, just before the dawn of the dot-com boom.
Also, interestingly, the segment highlights the recent political landscape around the world, just four years after Tiananmen Square and shortly after the failed Russian coup in 1991, and how internet bulletin boards were basically the Twitter of their time allowing immediate, uncensored information to be spread during a crisis.
