"Dude it was called @ Cafe — and they didn't know what the @ symbol was."
"Welcome to @ Cafe, as in that little a with a circle around it."
"I was actually bitter that I named it @ Cafe.
I had to explain to everybody, every reporter, every human, every — even people who came
to work there — I had to explain what the @ symbol was."
"That little mark, with the A and then the ring around it."
"At."
"See, that's what I said.
Katie said she thought it was about."
"Yeah."
"Oh."
"But I'd never heard it said."
"And they're like, 'I get it, at the cafe.'
I was like, no, it's used in e-mail.
'What's email?'"
This is Glenn McGinnis in July 2016 and this is Glenn McGinnis in July 1995.
In January of 1995, Glenn and his cofounders, Nick Barnes and Chris Townsend, opened one
of New York's first internet cafes: @ Cafe.
Their story isn't just about running a cafe, though it is definitely that.
"Um, you know it's fun to hang out, you can drink around your computer and not worry about
it."
It's a window into how it felt to be around the internet just as a mass audience was discovering
the exhilaration and exhaustion of a new medium.
"I'm terrified and excited."
And from the beginning, Glenn McGinnis knew one thing:
"How fast it was gonna hit.
And that it was going to be completely pervasive."
In the 1880s, St. Marks Place was part of a German-American neighborhood called Kleindeutschland.
12 St Marks Place was home to the German American shooting society clubhouse.
They came together to shoot, drink, and bowl.
By the 1920s, it was a homeless shelter run by a guy who called himself Mr. Zero.
He sheltered a thousand people who he affectionately called "Old Bucks and Lame Ducks."
And after that, the building continued to house legendary tenants.
"We selected 12 St. Marks Place.
It was the old St. Marks Bookstore.
And that has a really storied history with all sorts of amazing authors reading their
work there.
And so to me it was very symbolic of internet, the new media, and you know, I wanted to be
there.
In that spot.
It seemed so appropriate."
But convincing investors was harder.
The idea was a really new one.
"I lived overseas a lot as a kid.
I was always obsessed with video games.
I played Pong and they could not pry me off it, and in 1980 we moved to Tokyo, and it
was like the Japanese were my people.
I mean, they just adored computers and video games."
"In Asia, most of the video games were tabletop.
So you'd sit — you could have coffee or whatever on the games — and they had coffeeshops
with these tabletop games.
I thought of the internet cafe probably because of the Tokyo experience with the tabletops."
Internet adoption was pretty low at the time.
Six months after @ Cafe launched, just 14% of Americans were using the internet.
How much more did the investors know?
"Zero!
They didn't know what it was.
They'd never been online.
It was Netscape 1.0.
They could only think of it in terms of Hard Rock.
That was it.
It will be the Hard Rock Cafe, but with computers rather than rock and roll."
"I was determined to do this thing, so I was like, fine."
"Well the @ Cafe, which is a cyber-bar down in New York City's East Village is where we
went to visit."
The @ Cafe didn't have dial-up.
Instead, they paid for a premium T1 connection — the type that universities and really
large businesses had.
It was much faster than dial-up modems, but that stability came at a hefty price.
"The T1 cost $9000 a month!
I think my FIOS which is 75 megabits, synchronous, is $100.
Maybe $200.
It's amazing how in 20 years..."
The @ Cafe had a world class internet connection for the time, and they personally negotiated
to get it.
"We basically, for Chris Townsend and myself, just created hell for ourselves.
The pipes for the hot water and everything ran through the server room.
We didn't know anything, we had no money to ask anybody.
So there was no ventilation.
And we had no money for air conditioning.
So we made it a responsibility of the dishwasher to fill up a garbage can — I mean a giant
garbage can — with ice from the ice maker, and drag it into the server room.
And that thing would melt to water every two hours.
And that's how we cooled the server room, was with a friggin' thing of ice."
The excitement came from the idea itself, that people would want to go on the internet
for fun, to connect.
"If you go back and look, anybody can go into the Internet Archive and look at what the
websites looked like back then.
I mean, it's freaking hysterical.
I mean, there was not a lot out there.
And these pages were text — they weren't high bandwidth pages."
Despite the headaches, it still felt like the start of something.
"Everyone is like waking up to the internet.
I mean, you have to understand, no business had a website.
Very idealistic and then the corporations started to hit and that's when they just came
knocking at the door and it was like they all wanted to do web launches because there
was nowhere they could all put their homepage up on all the computers."
And a bevy of new websites had launch parties at the @ Cafe.
"I was working non-stop."
They did events, they ran an ISP, and they continued to serve the weird culture of a
still-bohemian St. Marks.
Artists like Mark Yankus even made ads for them.
"Everyone, college students, artists, East Village freaks, Phiber Optik and his whole
crew, when he got out of jail, he made that his hangout spot, he was there all the time."
"That's Phiber Optik with a PH."
"Today, five hackers were indicted on Federal wire fraud charges."
"When we changed the menu he got bummed, and we saw less of him."
"A lot of hackers were there.
A lot of artists, a lot of students, it was an amazing mix of people.
The media was all over it, and so people were coming from Japan specifically to see the
cafe."
But despite all that, a little over a year later, in 1996, @ Cafe closed down.
"It was horrible from the beginning.
We never ever broke even, it was the most stressful thing...it was very stressful."
It'd be simpler to say that people retreated from internet cafes to use the internet at
home, and there were a lot of AOL CDs offering people free trials.
"We had hundreds of AOL CDs at the cafe.
I mean just the amount of CDs was just ludicrous."
But the cafe closed for a lot of reasons.
It was tough to make money with a T1 connection, but it was also just tough to run a restaurant
in general.
The internet wasn't the problem, the business was before its time.
"It was so idealistic, what we were doing.
It was just to educate, and the internet would never be monetized."
"The idea was really to create a physical space to present virtual space, to extend
the invitation to the public and say, 'Here is the internet at its best.'"
Today, 12 St. Marks Place is not a German shooting gallery, or a homeless shelter, or
a bookshop, or an internet cafe.
It's apartments, a yoga studio, and a Latin organic vegan restaurant.
There's no shooting gallery, bowling alley, bookshop, or old bucks and lame ducks.
But they do have one thing.
"So I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about the business there, just to
check my information.
Do you have internet there?"
"Yes."
"Do you know how fast it is?"
"I don't know how fast it is.
I know it's fast enough, all of our guests use it fine."
Glenn told me that video chat was actually really popular in the early days of the cafe,
but the quality left something to be desired.
This is what most video chats would have looked like using the CUCMe software that was popular
at the time.