In memoriam

With Geocities officially shutting its doors today, it’s time for us vets of the Net to reminisce and reflect on when the Internet was a much simpler place. Back in the late 90s, the Internet was truly a wild, untamed frontier. It was barren enough that most people didn’t have an e-mail address, let alone go on the "Inter Net". Back then you could truly separate your offline and online identities, because back then Google was just a word in the dictionary. Search engines like Lycos, Geocities, AltaVista, Hot Bot, MSN – these were the players in the search market and they were doing a shit job at that.

Back then you could find a little corner of the Internet and stake your claim, and the mere fact you had a website gave you all the geek cred in the world. If you had a site that was 3/4 finished and that didn’t have broken image links on it (or under construction .gifs), you were a rock star (because you were probably hot-linking them off other people’s servers, or if you were ambitious, off other free accounts you signed up for yourself to get more space from). If you didn’t have the money to buy your own server space – which no one seems to have had since web space cost probably 10× more than it does now – you could sign-up for a free ~1MB ad-supported account, probably with 200KB or similar monthly bandwidth. Geocities and Tripod was where it was at and love it or hate it, thinking back on those Geocities communities, they weren’t that bad an idea. Enchanted Forest ring a bell to anyone?

I could go on (and I will in future posts), but the purpose of this was to share with you what I dug up on my hard drive. Not many of you know, but I am one of the worst digital packrats you will ever meet. I have files dating back to my elementary school, Grade 5 book reports, saved in DOS Corel WordPerfect 5.1 format. They’re barely readable but I still get some non-garbled text when opening them in Textpad.

I also keep the websites that I developed. I have a copy of all of them, including the Paint Shop Pro layout files, except my very first endeavours on Geocities. It’s unfortunate I don’t have those; I still remember it – all black background with garish purple menu background with aliased yellow highlights. It was a sight to behold. I digress.

Long story short, here’s a screenshot from my website from the turn of the millennium.

Obviously the links won’t work…

• Canice: solar plexus – http://members.dencity.com/googoly/index.html
• Ashley: *Pierced Everything Is Pleasureful Pain* – http://www.members.tripod.com/~Starlyter/frame.html
• Adam: DeScEnT…now. – http://members.tripod.com/descent77/
• Andrew: Edge’s Realm – http://www.geocities.com/edge_1414/main.html
• Alex: Kinetik – http://www.geocities.com/karmic_kitty/karmic_kitty.html

Just pointing out the gratuitous use of sticky caps by Dodd and emo exhibition by Ashley. Good times.