Europe '96: Cybercafes

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Note: 2015

I'm leaving this page up for historic reasons, but, believe me, there is no other reason to care about decades-old information about cybercafes in Europe. Five years later, there were thousands of cybercafes in Europe and elsewhere, especially in cities that were simultaneously relatively poor and relatively large, such as Sevilla or Bucharest. By the way, in Bucharest, as of 2002, use of a computer cost about US$1 an hour. Now cybercafes are mostly gone, because almost everyone has a device of their own and so many places offer free wi-fi.

Cybercafes

In planning for this trip, I discovered that cybercafes are beginning to pop up in Europe as well as in the states. In researching this, I ran into some info I'd like to share.

A useful jumping-off point was a listing [2002: which is no longer at http://www.comcirc.com.au/biz/cafe/] which in turn points [2002: OK, "pointed"] to several well-maintained lists of cybercafes. Notable among what I found through this was Ciberteca in Madrid [no longer a cybercafe in 2002, more of an ISP/custom dev shop], Spain. If you speak/read Spanish, it looks [OK, looked] like a very good gateway into some of the Spanish-language (or, as they would have it castellano) portions of the Internet. Another excellent cybercafe, though pretty useless as a Web page, is Barcelona's Cafe del Internet. [As of 2002, their onetime URL - www.cafeinternet.es - is defunct. They lost their lease late in '01 as their building was being converted to a four-star hotel.] In the morning (they open 10 am), it's nearly all American and Canadian students taking advantage of Telnet when its the middle of the night in America.

As far as I can tell, the much rumored "Terminal Bar" in Prague is either history or fiction [and that was in 1996!]. There is a cybercafe there, although with limited (late afternoon, early evening) opening hours. I spotted it the last day I was there and (sorry) didn't make a not of its name or address, but it's not far from Wenceslaus Square, on the left side as you face the river (which you can't see!) with Wilsonova behind you.

Budapest has a great cybercafe, in a great location in the basement of a beautiful 19th century building, the Mucsarnok on the Heroes's Plaza. Cheap ( about US$3/hour) and with excellent equipment.

The Cafe Stein in Vienna, 6-8 Wäringerstrasse, just outside the Ring, has a mere 4 terminals on a Unix system, almost no support, but a good high-speed connection, basically a tiny cyber-annex to an otherwise normal Vienna Cafe]

Finally, in Berlin, on the Adenauer-Platz on Ku'damm, the Virtuality Cafe, mostly a bar where people go to put on headsets and play virtual reality games, has two Internet workstations. They don't open till 2pm.


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Originally written: 1996


Last modified: 26 February 2021

My e-mail address is jmabel@joemabel.com. Normally, I check this at least every 48 hours, more often during the working week.