Ivan Pope

Ivan Pope is a British technologist who was involved with a number of early internet developments in the UK and across the world, and invented the "cybercafe" at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. He was a founder of two of the first internet magazines, The World Wide Web Newsletter, and later .net magazine in the UK. In 1994 he founded Webmedia to professionalise the process of web site design and build. In 1995 he was involved with the creation of the domain name management company NetNames.

After graduating from Goldsmiths College with a BA degree in Fine Art in 1990, Pope worked as an artist with Loophole Cinema for five years. The World Wide Web Newsletter (later 3W magazine) was created by Pope at Goldsmiths' College Computer Centre early in 1993. The magazine was conceived as a general internet information source to promote Internet use. The name was taken from the World Wide Web project of Tim Berners-Lee and the first issue was published in late 1993. As reported in that issue, there were at the time under 100 web servers in the world.

3W opened up many opportunities and Pope left Goldsmiths College to concentrate on web development work. Pope attended the first London Internet World exhibition in 1994 as an exhibitor with 3W magazine. He was hired by Time Out magazine in London to consult on their early web development.

Pope was asked to curate an Internet component for an arts symposium held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Inspired by reports of a cafe with bulletin board access in the US, he created a cybercafe for a weekend in the ICA theatre, part of an event called "Towards the Aesthetics of the Future", placing internet access Apple Macs on the cafe style tables and creating the first internet cafe as well as coining the word 'cybercafe'.

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