The Blogosphere has been abuzz over the past few days, with remembrances of the halcyon days of the internet viewed through the lens of atrociously-designed GeoCities sites. If you missed the xkcd GeoCities tribute, you’ll have to be content with a screenshot, as it was a limited-time engagement. (Update: a mirror) The Archive Team is working on saving as much of GeoCities as possible for future generations. The internet is ephemeral, and, like ancient civilizations, it seems we’re constantly building our new cities on the ashes of our old cities, but, this being the internet, in a much faster cycle. Like anthropologists who get excited about pot shards or shriveled woven sandals found in a cliff dwelling, a lot of internet old-timers like me get pretty nostalgic about how the internet used to be, and think it’s worth preserving, or at least commemorating.
I ran across an excellent article today entitled “Goodbye GeoCities: 7 Retro Things We’ll Miss Forever.” It lists mid 90s web conventions that have fallen from favor (for good reason), such as “under construction” GIFs, guestbooks, “webmasters” and the marquee tag. Looking over this list, I remembered just how Wild West those early days were, and how home-grown the internet was, and what an earth-shattering milestone the popularization of the internet was in the history of computing.
When OSNews had its ten year anniversary in 2007, I created a live archive of old OSNews pages, and I think both the news and the the design of the site hold up pretty well, but slick design was by no means the norm back then. But in the earlier days of the internet, the Web was only one of several ways to view internet content, and in fact, earlier on, was the worst way. The net experience back then was much more desktop-centric, and each internet user had a quiver of desktop apps to perform various tasks. Let me actually take a step back and mention that in the early nineties, it was more common to actually use only the terminal to connect to the internet. My first few years on the net was viewed through a terminal window to an aging VAX/VMS machine. But later on, it was desktop apps for email, FTP, Usenet, (and later) IM and Napster. And, of course, a Web browser. As the internet has become more Web-centric, and the computing landscape has become more internet-centric, the browser has replaced not only many of the old internet apps, but has started to replace all desktop apps. In the unlikely case of a marketing slogan becoming reality, the Network really is the Computer.
I think that one of the reasons that people get nostalgic about how the network used to be is that, just like the great indie band that goes mainstream, old-time fans are simultaneously prideful about having known them before they were popular and resentful at having to share with all the latecomers. It’s about losing the sense of wonder and community that used to exist. I remember that, years ago, I used to buy and sell things on the various “forsale” Usenet groups. The internet was a relatively tight-knit community back then, and you could generally know who someone was by looking at their email address. Their domain name was either a school or company, and their username was a short version of their real name. [email protected] was A. Smith, a student or faculty member at University of Michigan, and if they were on the internet, it pretty much meant they were a member of the geek elite. Because of this, often when I bought something on the internet, the seller would mail it to me, and when I got it in good condition, he would trust me to send a check.
I went back to Archive.org today to see whether my very first website was stored there. It was a site that I’d made as part of a school project on Western US Land-use issues and wilderness preservation. It’s on there, but all of the images have been lost to time. When I made it, I had recently made the move from Gopher to the WWW, and I was still bristling at the difficulty of creating an aesthetically-pleasing web site. HTML was easy to learn, but very difficult to use well, even for a master. Its layout capabilities were rudimentary, and your page would look different in every web browser. Sites like Geocities, and the software that I helped create, ShopSite, attempted to make creating a web site easier for the non-technical, but the tools that we had to work with ensured that we wouldn’t be able to help people very much – either we bound them with overly-restrictive templates that didn’t let them express their creativity, or we handed them a loaded gun and let them shoot themselves in the face.
While I feel nostalgic about the internet of the past, I wouldn’t want to go back. Just like I wouldn’t want to go back to a 486 running Windows 3.1 or a Performa running System 9. If I never saw another “under construction” icon being used un-ironically, I could live my life in complete contentment. But I treasure the memories, and I’ll miss GeoCities, even though I had been scarcely aware that it was still up, and can’t remember the last time I ever visited.
I’m getting old
I’m only 24, and even I felt nostalgic about this. You don’t have to be old for this one.
I’m 24, too. You don’t think we are old? It’s like a 100 Internet Years.
24 as well, and while I feel rather whistful about the internet as it was, it’s not Geocities or the rest of that crap I remember in a positive way. Geocities, tripod, angelfire, etc… all full of pop-up adds to the point where by the time you found some actual useful content you’d pretty much given up on it for the day anyway. You know what I miss the most? A google ad-free internet, where every site wasn’t slammed with ads all over the place. Sure, there were pop-up ads but they weren’t everywhere except on hosting places like geocities. No, google ads are far more far-reaching and even more annoying, and what’s worse is a lot of ad blockers can’t catch them all… and then every other advertiser followed google’s lead. Arrrgghhh! Oh, and Flash wasn’t so far reaching and used for sites where it wasn’t needed. That’s what I miss, not the ad-ridden, virus-infested hosting services.
Hey, my tripod pages are still up. Didn’t realize how many ads were tacked on until I disabled adblock
I’m felt nostalgic about it too, and I’m 22.
Nostalgic and I’m 20. Beat ya!
I’m 27 and I couldn’t care less.
I had a Geocities account beck in the 1 year of it going live and even I was glad to move away to another free host that offered more space and faster bandwidth.
In my opinion Geocities was a great concept, yet still one of the worst free hosts around.
Good grief. I’m 44. You guys are a bunch of puppies!
I can understand getting kind of nostalgic about geocities, but nostalgia tends to imply that the memory is positive. I’ve been to plenty of geocity sites in my day, but as a rule, geocity sites were hideous and I’m glad that they are no longer the norm.
<wishful thinking>Now if only flash would die, maybe we could still have good-lucking sites…</wishful thinking>
Whilst true, it reminds me of the early days of the ’Web, where there were no ads. You could find anything you wanted fairly easy. You could even visit most of the sites in existence yourself, ‘around the web in 80 days’ as it were, imagine that!
I remember a web with tons of popup ads…ah the days before firefox…
The modern spyware era didn’t begin until 2001. But yes, those few years of running IE taught me a lot about what I know of cleaning PCs and locking down Windows. I started using Firefox full time with v0.93. Korea is still stuck in 2001~2003 because of the Microsoft monopoly. 99.9% people use Windows and IE because there is no other choice. It’s a real major concern. To think it used to be like that (and how much things have changed for the better) just because of Firefox.
I remember the late 90’s when almost everyone gave up on mozilla and I am so glad that my “lost cause” came true in the end. Imagine an internet that required an IE browser. We could have had that!
<wishful thinking> MySpace Decommissioning Unleashes Torrent of Nostalgia </wishful thinking>
If you looked at ‘View Source’ that day, the website was obviously hand-coded HTML. Yes, HTML, from back when it was a literal text markup language and not a minimal wrapper for a designed-by-committee page layout schema.
The only way it could have been more 90s-tastic is if the site’s code had a <meta> tag with the words “AOL Page Generator 8.0” somewhere in there.
Edited 2009-10-27 21:15 UTC
I liked the GOTOs:
A GOTO 50 in a script tag
A GOTO 10 at the bottom, below the closing HTML tag
So it’s even funny if you shove the source at your favourite validator – very clever!
It’s xkcd, not XKCD!
Also, there is a mirror at http://sean.raptorswithhats.com/geoxkcd.html if you can’t live with just a screenshot.
I fixed the capitalization, and thanks for the mirror link.
My own contribution to the era.
http://commodoreweb.camendesign.com
Yes, this was real. Major lols.
I love the 10/11/01 comment.
For some reason it doesn’t make me sad… Sites like those were used for drive by downloads and all sorts of crazy botnet activities. They are a nightmare to control as many of their hosted sites are good but there’s quite a few that aren’t.
Like:
zhigablog.freehostia.com/boo/bot.exe – Which hosts a Zeus download.
Or this one, which up to recently it was hosting a Zeus config file.
wchessmanva.tripod.com/temp.jpg
RIP GeoCities, I’ll sleep sounder with it around.
Could someone please explain how is Geocities fundamentally different from facebook or myspace?
As far as I can tell, all of them are for creating personal websites, right? It just seems like facebook might have better built in tools for creating sites, whereas, with Geocities, you used your own html editor. So, any fundamental differences???
So, why is facebook the biggest thing around today, and Geocities is dead?
Forgive me if I just don’t get this facebook thing, perhaps I spend too much time every day writing neural simulations, and not browsing for the latest Indianapolis Colts or Pacers fan sites, or whatever fan sites people post on facebook.
Facebook is not for designing websites, it is for personal blogging and playing the mindless games that exist on it. Same thing as MySpace is, there is not really any difference between the 2. Why it is the biggest thing around I have no idea whatsoever.
Facebook has relatively rigid limitation on the format and content of your personal page. Basically you get to have text and various application gadgets. You do not get multiple pages or even layouts as complicated as tables. More importantly, Facebook is not really intended for general informative content; the custom content of a person’s Facebook page is generally a small amount of biographical information. Facebook is mostly for communication (its internal IM, forum-type “comment” streams on all of the content, public and private directed messaging).
On the other hand, Geocities seemed much more focused on hosting actual content. Sure, there were probably a ton of personal web pages with just biographical information and possibly blog-like updates, but the sites that actually came up on searches contained actual content on some topic the author was interested in. I remember regularly running across Geocities web pages that actually had useful content years ago. Now general information searches usually get me to Wikipedia instead of random websites.
As for why Facebook (well, social networking sites in general) is popular: there is no other easy way to share discussions, photos, interesting links, etc. among many friends.
Facebook does not make your eyes bleed. Myspace does though so not much difference there.
Facebook originally had stricter membership… for colleges/schools and that sort of thing. Then they opened it wide to everyone.
There is a new site for companies-only. You register with your work email address and everyone with the same “@company-name.com” are instantly “friends.” It’s an interesting site. None of the glitz, just made for passive communication.
There are things I miss about the internet’s days of old, but Geoshitties is definitely NOT one of them. If you get nostalgic about the horrible web pages that were on that site, just go look at some of the horrible profiles on Myspace, and you will see that not much has changed.
As long as HTML (and by extension, Flash) exists, people will find a way to do craptastic things with it.
Edited 2009-10-27 22:22 UTC
Looks like the course syllabi I posted are in the archive. My apologies to the FOSS community for the footer; I was young and ignorant:
<td align=center>
<CENTER><FONT size=1>Best experienced with<BR><A href=”http://www.microsoft.com/ie/default.asp“>
<IMG alt=”Microsoft Internet Explorer” border=0 height=31 src=”./ie_animated.gif” vspace=7 width=88> <BR>
Click here to start. </FONT></CENTER><BR></td>
I learned a lot from GeoCities, namely, scabs do form over eyeballs.
GeoCities did contribute much to the internet, though, and not just tasteless page design. It paved the way for all the social networking sites and services we have now. For better or for worse, it play a large part in the migration to this always-on digital lifestyle. I never used it myself, of course. My own ISP provided me a whopping 15MB of storage, way more than GeoCities’ 2MB they offered at the time.
One think I’ll never understand, however, is how so many people thought magenta and chartreuse were complimentary colors.
Still available in goole’s cache “c++ site:geocities.com”. A lot of, very good and valuable tutorial about programming and many compyter related topicsm, probably will be lost forever
. Why just convert existent geocities pages to another form of web hosting on yahoo?
To get the full geocities experience, just take a skim through the website of “Bud Uglly Wab Designs:
http://budugly.com/archivebud/bud9806/bud.html
(WARNING: may cause ocular bleeding – the goggles, they will do nothing. If exposure does not result in immediate laughter, or at least cringing, then subject should NEVER be allowed to work as a designer)
hahaha soo true, that is what I remember most about Geocities in one page. So many obnoxious colors and animated gifs it was ridiculous, and don’t forget the people who used animated gif as their background, it beat my poor 486dx 33 into submission every time even with my spiffy #9 imagine 8mb card, and 8mb upgraded ram. *sigh*
Like Airwolf? Here’s someone who found a novel way to save some geocities sites:
http://archive.airwolf.tv
And there’s no annoying sidebar anymore. Long live chartreuse!
Edited 2009-10-28 02:22 UTC
AIR WOLF!! That was my show when I was younger, along with Night Rider.
WikiMedia sites are in fifth place (under Facebook) in pops. Their main characteristics are easy editing (and discussion) of the presentation of the page and easily recalling the historical presentations (and discussions).
The irrational exuberance (I might share with the author) for historical access to old web site graphics and interfaces might come from the philosopher in us hoping we’ll get an opportunity to find the meaning of some other aspect of life, buried in the patterns of any process of historical development.
Because computing offers an excellent memory and search algorithms, we should keep all content for the sole purpose of later analysis by theoreticians researching the process of development.
For example, compare “worst” web sites with “worst” aspects of other human developments in real societies. The top worst web site linked by the article was a face in the clouds. Why is that so bad? When did self deification ever offend anyone? (Hint: plenty of times.)
I read OSnews because I think computing developments in general are an an excellent source of analogy to human societal developments including artifactual excavations. I have hope in some future for the valuable analysis of all of it.
I can’t remember anything on GeoCities that actually worked. I do remember countless search results in Altavista, Lycos, Infoseek and Yahoo pointing to webpages from GeoCities, only to find a dreadded “404 Not Found” or a more stylized (yet similar in nature) message once I clicked on those links.
So for all those useless clicks on search engine links, from the bottom of my heart: Good Riddance, GeoCities!