Good stuff
By Kenneth Neil Cukier
October 1, 2000 8:00am

Around the corner from a tranquil canal in Amsterdam is a radically new-age cybercafe, a sort of Amnesty International-meets-Scott McNealy. Anti-Microsoft (Nasdaq : MSFT) to the core, it's called ASCII -- not the 7-bit digital Roman alphabet, but the Amsterdam Subversive Code for Information Interchange. It might represent the future of the Internet zeitgeist, a testament to how good people can put the Net to good uses, an almost forgotten concept in this age of dot-com greed.
Located in a small basement underneath an anarchist bookshop, ASCII is a coöperative comprised of around 30 volunteers who rejigger archaic computers from the '80s to mid-'90s so they work essentially as network computers, useful for surfing the Net and not much else. Vintage office IBMs, Apples, PC Ataris, and odd East German computers dot the tables. Heavy wires worm along the walls and stream down from the ceiling like cyber stalactites in a digital dungeon. And, of course, it all runs on Linux.
The ASCII project is a humanitarian one above all. With donated computers, techies donate their time to bring Internet access and computer hardware to youth organizations and schools in low-income areas of the Netherlands. As a cybercafe, ASCII is as noncommercial as it gets. Surfing the Net is free, and bottles of beer are sold just slightly above cost to pay rent (the group worked in a squat until it got evicted).
As one volunteer engineer put it, ASCII's aim is to prove that the IT industry's upgrade ethos and reliance on Microsoft is unnecessary. The ASCII Web site is at http://squat.net/ascii.