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/

  • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz
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    14 hours ago

    There are different Amish groups with different tolerances for technology. Some Amish are allowed to use electricity/etc as long as they generate it themselves instead of buying it from a power company for example. They have amish-specific low function computers they use for spreadsheets and the like.

    Direct internet access is normally not allowed now, but I could imagine that’s not universal or may not have been banned in the early days. Many modern Amish are allowed to use various work arounds for internet access, like fax services that they can fax a search to, and it will fax back screenshots of web results and websites.