Eva Pascoe: Making the Internet cool in London Artwork

Tech Business History

TBH explores how tech businesses got started, how they succeeded or failed and what it was like to work in them. Presenter Charles Miller is a former BBC producer who specialised in documentaries about technology and business. In TBH he continues his research, meeting key people whose stories tell us how technology found its way into our lives. In this first series, he talks to those behind the dot com boom and bust in the UK in the late 1990s.

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Tech Business History

Eva Pascoe: Making the Internet cool in London

May 08, 2019 • Eva Pascoe, Charles Miller (presenter) • Season 1 • Episode 3

0:00 | 49:31

Eva Pascoe came to London from her native Poland to study human-computer interaction and psychology. In 1994, she founded Cyberia, possibly the world's first Internet cafe, which was described by Wired magazine as “the most fashionable cafe in '90s London”. Backed by Mick Jagger, and visited, unexpectedly, by Bill Gates, Cyberia became a hub for first-time users of the Internet, especially women, and a growing arts tech scene. In this podcast, Eva remembers those heady days, how Cyberia expanded to a dozen international branches before she sold the business, and how it was almost as hard to find a decent cup of coffee in London back then as it was to get Internet access.