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/

  • philpo@feddit.orgEnglish
    3·
    11 hours ago

    Yeah. Some even go on Holidays to Florida.

    I have some very very remote family links to an Amish family. They absolutely use technology but can only do so for work purposes, the computer is highly locked down, in a special room at their work (a carpentry business) and only specific people are allowed to use it. But they have a newsletter and do market their products online and may have a website (But I don’t know the latter for sure).

    It was long debated in their community if it was permissible for us to send them E-Mails as that clearly is a personal purpose, but with us being in Europe and Australia it was also considered that the “bond of the family” is important to them. In the end they found a typical “Amish” solution - a very “special one”. We received their monthly newspaper(which is normally printed only,but is electronically produced) and were allowed to send “urgent” messages (e.g. if someone was born,died,etc.) to them(and they were allowed to answer then). But not personal business, that has to go through regular mail. (Funny enough when I was in highschool and asked a few general questions via e-mail for a school presentation that was sooner than mailing back and forth allowed, that brought up another big discussion and they had to decide if answering my questions would already be proselytising or not. (It wasn’t but that took longer than my presentation date…so it didn’t help so much).

    We have lost contact sadly during COVID as their children all didn’t come back from Rumspringa(and are seemingly not interested )and the parents have grown old - which is a bit sad considering that this connection was held up for the whole time since the Amish left Europe.

    • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      11 hours ago

      Thanks for sharing this, I find the Amish practices and work arounds for technology really fascinating for some reason. I’d love to tour some of the more technology permissive Amish communities and learn about their rules and restrictions on its use, but unfortunately there’s not any living in my area (not to mention needing to get approval to be shown around).