Nearby Café: In-house News Archives

The Café Meets Houston FotoFest

With the kind permission of Photoshop teaching whiz Katrin Eismann, and the use of the facilities at the Fondren Library of Rice University in Houston, at Houston FotoFest, on the afternoons of March 4-7, 1996 the Café's Allan Coleman and Nina Sederholm walked approximately 100 entranced photo folks through the Café. Visitors from England, Scotland, Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Italy, Israel, Venezuela and other nations got a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this Website, and a demystifying introduction to the Internet. A good time was had by all, and converts aplenty -- to the Café, of course, but, more importantly, to this extraordinary new medium -- were made.
The Café in Kafkaville

A few months later, in July 1996, Allan and Nina gave a similar tutorial at Cybeteria in Prague -- the first cyber-café in the Czech Republic. Eastern Europe is still only intermitently wired and on-line, so many of those in attendance -- a paying audience of about fifty people -- had barely heard iof the 'Net and the Web. But Cybeteria -- clean and modern in design, with a dozen terminals, large-screen projection capacities, and a well-stocked bar, snacks, and expresso/capuccino offerings -- awaits the inevitable surfers.