Harvard Square Cafe Offers Cyberspace, Hot Coffee Too

At Harvard Square’s newest cafe, there are no dogeared copies of Baudelaire or Byron on the tables. No photocopies of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. No outlines for the Great American Novel.

The tables at Cybersmith are covered with computers.

This is a place where people can have a cup of cappuccino and try all the computer tools and toys they’ve been hearing about.

“It’s a lot easier than I thought,” said John Barbieri, pointing and clicking his way to everything from Impressionist paintings to sports schedules on the Internet.

Cybersmith, situated in a part of town crowded with coffee shops and bookstores frequented by students and professors at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other schools, is not the first cafe to go on line.

Seven or eight have opened in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco with a computer terminal or two in the back so customers can log on to the Internet. A cafe opened in London last fall with seven terminals.

But Cybersmith has 48 work stations and a smorgasbord of technology: the latest multimedia titles, on-line services, virtual reality and video games. It opened this month after a $1-million investment.

“The underlying concept is to take whatever the new technology is as it comes out and say to the public, ‘Come on in, check it out,” said its founder, Marshall Smith, a Boston-area entrepreneur who also built the Paperback Booksmith and Videosmith chains.

The cafe offers everything from a $1 coffee to lunch. (To order your sticky bun, click on Smitty’s On-Line Cafe on one of the terminals.)

Along with the waiters and waitresses is a staff of technical support people to explain how to use all the machines.