Pioneers established Scotland’s first ever internet cafe
Brothers Gavin and Douglas Nicholson provided access to the web for a generation of online novices, writes
Aquarter of a century ago, a Scottish dot-com revolution was born, as brothers Gavin and Douglas Nicholson introduced the worldwide web to a whole generation who had never surfed it before.
Based on an existing model already operating in London, and thought to be the world’s first, the entrepreneurial pair founded Cyberia internet cafe on Hanover Street in the heart of Edinburgh’s New Town.
Opened to much fanfare in April 1995, the cutting edge cafe welcomed its first customers in an era when fewer than two per cent of UK households had access to the newfangled “information superhighway”. It was the first cafe of its kind in Scotland.
A few months earlier, Gavin had attended the Cyberia London launch to see what all the fuss was about.
“It was all a bit rough and ready but attracting an enormous – global – media attention,” said Gavin, 61.
A franchise agreement was hastily signed with Cyberia London, but as Oasis and Blur were busy battling it out in the UK singles charts, the Nicholson brothers were engaged in a Britpop era skirmish of their very own with a rival internet cafe.
Ian Mccarron, owner of Web13 on Bread Street, also opened a net cafe in the spring of 1995 and was very close to taking Cyberia’s crown as Scotland’s first.
A deal was quickly struck that would temporarily block Mccarron from using Cyberia’s intellectual property and enabled the Nicholson brothers to open a week earlier.
Gavin explains: “We discovered he [Ian Mccarron] had been down at Cyberia London the day before me and was setting up himself, so we were then racing to be the first and get the TV coverage.
“There was a bit of a rivalry there. We got the thunder in the press, he didn’t, which was probably fair.”
Priced at £2.50 per half hour, which the Nicholson brothers admit wasn’t particularly cheap, Cyberia boasted around a dozen PCS fed by 56k dial-up connections and using the most basic – Netscape Navigator 1.0 – web browsers. It was all a far cry from the flashy user interfaces and gigabit broadband many of us take for granted today, but for nineties youngsters, this was the future.
There were “Cyberguides” on hand to help first-time users, while the Edinburgh cafe had an in-house design team who built sites for the brothers, including The Cludgie, Cyberia’s official chat room, the name of which was inspired by the random scribblings people left on toilet walls.
The he Cyberia team also produced the first websites for the likes of the Bank of Scotland and even The Scotsman, which the brothers believe was a world first.
“We have a long history with The Scotsman,” said Gavin. “They were very keen to see what they should be doing to embrace the future.
“Globally, it was probably the first completely automated online newspaper and it was all run from this truly electric server, which had the computing power of probably the lowliest ipad today.”
In spite of these corporate ventures, the net cafe side of Cyberia struggled to “wash its face” and turn a profit for the brothers – but it led to something far more lucrative.
In 1997, Gavin started up Realise, which would go on to generate millions the following decade as the country’s largest corporate website consultant. As Realise took centre stage at the turn of the millennium, home internet access soared and big rival outlets, such as Easy Everything, swallowed up Gavin and Douglas’s customer base.
By late 2001, the brothers took the decision to take Cyberia offline.
Gavin added: “People still come up to me and say they first used the internet at our cafe or even met their partner in one of our chat rooms. You don’t appreciate until it’s over how massive it was.
“I’m grateful for it and I’m grateful that out of it came a business that made us money.”