Edinburgh embraced the internet in a big way during the dot com boom of the late '90s and early '00s, with numerous internet cafés opening up.
In those days before web access became commonplace in capital households, locals would fork out a couple of quid for an hour of surfing and checking of emails at places such as Cyberia, Web13, Electric Frog and a host of other small independent internet cafés covering almost every corner of the city.
But if there was one internet café to rule them all then it was most definitely the massive easy Everything café on Rose Street in the city centre. With more than 400 terminals over multiple floors, the Hanover Buildings outlet was the largest internet café in Edinburgh and by some margin.
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On busy days, the popular web access mecca would be packed out by people of all ages eager to get connected and enter the digital age. And while speeds were slow compared with today, they were significantly faster than most locals had experienced before.
Easy Everything was part of a chain of internet-ready coffee shops operating in many major cities in Europe and North America. The brainchild of Greek Cypriot entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou, of EasyJet and EasyHotel fame, the internet café brand started in London in 1999 and spread to Edinburgh the following year.
What set easy Everything apart from its competitors, asides from faster speeds, large number of terminals and generally superior hardware, was the fact that its pricing was based on occupancy levels. This meant that if the café was fairly empty then you could surf all day for pennies, or up to 80 per cent less than you might expect to be charged at an independent café.
The chain also became a partner of Microsoft and was able to supply customers with exclusive games and other software benefits. The company also provided 24/7 access to the cafés, meaning, for the first time, web users could access the net at any time they liked.
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In truth, though, most of us - particularly younger users - would visit easy Everything to simply browse the web (using Netscape, Yahoo! or AOL - Google wasn't trendy yet), play rudimentary flash games, and ask random strangers their A/S/L (age, sex, location, for those not up with early 2000s web lingo) on the Wild West-esque Yahoo! Chat boards, which were massively popular at the time.
Another great thing was the fact all of easy Everything's terminals boasted flat screen monitors, web cams and handsets - all of which were far from being standard in independent outlets in the early days of the internet. The ability to make video calls made the cafés perfect for people looking to chat with family and friends abroad, or, again, even just conversing with random folk on dodgy chat rooms.
As the number of households with internet access soared over the course of the 2000s, and smartphone technology increased to the point where almost everyone could surf the 'information super-highway' on the go, the internet café inevitably began to die out.
The Easy Everything chain, along with the vast majority of Edinburgh's internet cafés, was defunct by the end of the decade.
Nowadays, all you need is a decent signal or the magic Wi-Fi password and technically every café is an internet café - save for those that discourage you whipping out your mobile phone.
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