Geocities Shutting Down Today 396
Paolo DF writes "Geocities is closing today. Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speeds were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today. You may love it or hate it, but millions of people had their first contact with a Web presence right here. I know that Geocities is something that most Slashdotters will see as a n00b thing — the Internet was fine before Geocities — but nevertheless I think that some credit is due. Heck, there's even a modified xkcd homepage to mark the occasion." Reader commodore64_love notes a few more tributes around the Web. Last spring we discussed Yahoo's announcment that Geocities would be going away.
check the source. (Score:5, Informative)
<HTML WEB="2.0">
<HEAD>
<TITLE>
...
</HTML>
GOTO 10
Re:N00b thing? (Score:5, Informative)
Has it been that long?
Can someone help me install Trumpet Winsock so I can get my Windows 3.11 system in the internet using PPP?
Re:WTF Yahoo! (Score:5, Informative)
At least they archived all the "under construction" gifs [textfiles.com] (WARNING: clicking on that link may be dangerous to your mental health.) If anyone's interested this [metafilter.com] metafilter thread has the story of the guy who created the first of these gifs about halfway in.
Source code (Score:3, Informative)
{HTML WEB="2.0"}
{SCRIPT LANGUAGE="QBASIC">IF $BROWSER = "IE" THEN GOTO 50{/SCRIPT}
{TABLE BORDER="5" CELLPADDING="5" SHELL="REGEDIT.EXE"}
I know I am going to regret this... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.geocities.com/darthvain/ [geocities.com]
As much as geocities is horrible I don't think it holds a candle to "Myspace" web monstrosities with music and flashing crap. Geocities was good because it was the first big thing that let you host "stuff" for free. Now freehosting services are a dime a dozen, geocities isn't really needed, not to mention the myspaces and facebooks of the world now. However back in the day, if you didn't want to pay to host your own stuff, or didn't want to mess around a lot of dynamic IPs, host updaters, and setting up a private webserver and dns server (or pay for web creation software, or even bother to learn html) for the absolute free experience for a personal web page geocities was there. Again, now there are tons of free services out there, and pay ones that are not nearly as expensive as they used to be. Most noobs used it to basically say "Hi look at me, I am on the web!" which was served by MySpace and now Facebook really. ...and before you respond yes I know my geocities site is crap and I haven't updated it in years. Don't judge me, I was weak. :)
Re:N00b thing? (Score:5, Informative)
In November 1994 Netscape released its first beta, in December its first full version. For me, this was really when the web began to look more interesting - Navigator was well-made, there was graphical content and so forth. Also, don't forget, Navigator could use the Gopher protocol (my Firefox still can - Aerv.nl [aerv.nl]. From early 1995 on, you began to see an explosion of web content.
As far as hosting - in early 1996 I began working at an ISP which charged $50 a month for 10 megabytes of disk space, and the use of CGI, email and so forth was extra. And we were real cheap compared to some local competitors - people came flooding in to use us. Geocities began offering free (with advertising, a Geocities URL etc.) web pages in mid-1995, I created one in October 1995, as I certainly could not afford to shell out $50 a month for my web page back then. There was nothing really n00b about Geocities, Craigslist's web page did not have HTML as a job requirement when Geocities launched, in fact, Craigslist did not have a web page until 1996, the year after Geocities launched.
Re:N00b thing? (Score:3, Informative)
Back in those day getting a pipeline for hosting was very expensive. $1,000 a month for a T1. Cable Modems, DSL weren't there perhaps only in R&D, and some very select markets. The fastest way to connect was threw an ISDN line. Which was still expensive, but gave you speeds about 120Kbs. Most of the time you were on Modems ranging from speeds of 14.4k - 56.8 k Running a server off of this was silly at best. Geocities was a good place to cut your teeth in making webpages. Yes most of them were rather dumb and poorly designed. But so was the rest of the Web. For the most part when people are learning they setup their geocities account to learn new things, in the process make ugly pages.
Oh I can attach images like this. Hey it does animated gifs too. Oh I can change the colors around...
Re:Internet Archived; Time to Move On (Score:2, Informative)
Haha, funny.
NOT those kinds of files. I'm taking about things like my resume, the PCI Express specification, a list of resistor color codes, VHDL references, some MP3 music, and so on. Classified documents are not even allowed on networks (which always makes me wonder how these files leaked. You would have to carry a physical disk out of the sealed room, which is specifically forbidden).
Re:N00b thing? (Score:3, Informative)
Geocities offered a WYSIWYG page builder - you didn't need to know HTML.
Re:Got to give credit where credit is due... (Score:2, Informative)
LOL forgot about Angelfire!
I also remember people used to use these sites to host pirated stuff before there were torrents and the like.
Sure they would get taken down pretty quickly, but while they were up it was "come and get it while you still can!"
Long before that (when MP3 was non-existend or pretty young) some of those sites used to host MODs or MIDIs of the songs. I remember playing a MIDI (King of Fighters 95 music haha) and recording it directly to a cassette tape via headphone out of my audio card.
BTw, similar sites to Geocities which I remember are Xoom, Angelfire and tripod
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:N00b thing? (Score:1, Informative)
then figure out Linux or Trumpet winsock
Or MacTCP (pre-OpenTransport), which probably was a million times more prevalent among end users than linux as a whole at the time.