The Deleted City: GeoCities Archived

Walter

Administrator
Staff member
For those of us who were on the net around the end of the last century, GeoCities populated a distinct corner of the Internet. It was rarely pretty. But it was the germ for many sites that eventually became something greater. SKnet for example, was at first a geocities site, then a 50megs.com site, and then it got a domain.

In 2009, those thousands of geocities sites, representing the first baby steps of the common user "home page," were deleted. A 650 GB backup was made of that era, and it's being distributed via bittorrent for anyone interested (not sure who would be, outside of Internet historians, decades from now). This project, The Deleted City, is a visual representation of that time.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/26/the-deleted-city-visualizes-geocities-as-it-was-today/
 

Th3Branded0ne

I'll be back.
I remember back in highschool , when first using Netscape and doing a search on ask Jeeves. Those geocities links used to come up all the time. Many anime sites where there too.
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
I think it's great that they made a back up before pulling the plug. Not that I ever regarded Geocities with anything but contempt back then, but it is a part of the Internet's history.
 
650 gigs? I never imagined that such a long running and widely used service wouldn't take up even half of my external hard drive. I remember it from back in the days when people were still creating hideous webpages with tiny repeating image backgrounds instead of colors and unstyled links. Now I'm remembering the when I used askjeeves, dogpile, and 37 instead of google. The internet has come such a long way in everything except security and the people who browse it.
 

Viral Harvest

Every Knee Bent Too Shall Break
Saephon said:
Oh god...my webpage, SSJ5 Gogeta's Ultimate DBZ Realm is probably on there. :magni:

That title in itself represents soooo much about casually-made fanpages in the late 90s, and I can't say that mine was much different. Oh to be young... :ganishka:
 
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