Every morning thousands of Edinburgh locals browse the internet with a cup of tea or coffee in hand without giving it a moment's thought, yet back in the mid-1990s this seemingly simple routine involved a trip up town to a new-fangled type of café.
Opened in April 1995 when fewer than two per cent of UK households had web access, Cyberia internet café in Hanover Street was the very first of its kind in Scotland.
The pioneering establishment, which was the brainchild of brothers Gavin and Douglas Nicholson, provided many Edinburgh locals with what would be their first time surfing the World Wide Web.
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Named Cyberia, after the world's first internet café, which had only opened in London months earlier, this was uncharted territory for many people who had previously only heard about the new "information superhighway" on the TV via the likes of the BBC's Tomorrow's World.
As well as serving the usual range of hot beverages, filled rolls and sandwiches you would expect to find in any traditional city café, Cyberia had around a dozen computer stations each hooked to 56k dial-up connections and using Netscape Navigator 1.0 web browsers - no Google Chrome back in '95. All this could be accessed by regular punters for the not-so-cheap-for-1995 price of £2.50 for half an hour.
Aware that many people coming to Cyberia would be first-time users of the web, the Nicholson brothers hired "Cyberguides" to give customers a helping hand.
While there were already millions of web pages to visit by the mid-'90s, website design of the era was rudimentary by today's standards and loading times were positively glacial. Nevertheless, for the generation fortunate enough to witness it, this was the future.
Available on YouTube - which definitely wasn't available to Cyberia users - is a clip from STV's Scotland Today news programme which takes us back 27 years to the moment Cyberia opened.
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News anchor Shereen Nanjiani tell viewers that a "new café in Edinburgh" hopes to dispel the notion that surfing the web is only "for the experts".
"Edinburgh's newest café opened its doors this morning," declares STV reporter Emma Simpson. "On the menu: cappuccinos, croissants and computers."
Cyberia co-founder Gavin Nicholson then appears on camera to tell us about the benefits of this brave new world and its bound to succeed.
"The opportunities are as broad as the number of people out there linked to the internet," says Gavin.
"People can, for example, send E-mail - electronic mail - to their friends abroad, or family abroad, or business colleagues.
"They can conduct research, either for business, or, for journalists, for example, or school children can come in and conduct research for their school projects. But basically they can come in and have some fun."
Emma Simpson then shows viewers one of the many amazing things the internet can do, such as being able to send then US President Bill Clinton a message via the official website of the White House.
"It's obviously the future, isn't it?" says one very astute Cyberia customer. "So I thought I'd come in and see how it works."
Within a few years of Cyberia opening, numerous other internet cafés, including Web13, Electric Frog and the giant Easy Everything café on Rose Street, would eventually open up in Edinburgh.
Ultimately, however, the age of the web café would prove to be finite, with the number of capital residents gaining home access to the web rising exponentially over the following decade.
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