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GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

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Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#51

Post by skeeter2020 »

p3rls wrote: post #40
gonzobonzo wrote: post #38

This came up the other day and it became clear that many people, even on HN, don't realize that in the late 90's it was pretty common for non-tech people to have their own websites. There were many places where you could do this for free, and it was extremely easy to spin up a simple one. The actual content being shared - text and images - isn't really different from the majority of the content that's still being sha…

If you think of technical and nontechnical as a spectrum, the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals. And there was only so much to learn, too, at least as far as web development went-- not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database. Today I think those types of nontechnical people are pursuing far more lucrative niches in product management, de…

>> not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database.

Aside: the first time I put some data in a database table, and built a page to display it in the browser is one of those head exploding moments from my life.

I'm pretty sure it was MS Access, classic ASP (there were... 4? objects total to learn?) and IIS Express.

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#52

Post by skeeter2020 »

canjobear wrote: post #39
kalleboo wrote: post #10

One thing nobody remembers (or at least never writes about in these retrospectives) from the early days of Geocities is you literally had to virtually "walk" up and down "blocks" in the the "neighborhoods" to find a "vacant lot" to put your site in. When I initially tried to sign up, they had some beta of a "vacant lot finder" cgi form that didn't work. It wasn't like these days where you just sign up and get an acco…

It was a nice way to organize things so you could find stuff serendipitously. I remember clicking around in my neighborhood (where I had my N64 cheat codes website) and finding some cool website with lots of slick looking 3D renders. It's rare to stumble across unplanned-for things like that nowadays.

>> lots of slick looking 3D renders

one of the first things you had to do when putting up a page on geocities or tripod, or any other host was head over to cooltext.com and design your new logo!

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#53

Post by bryanthompson »

bcoates wrote: post #23
486sx33 wrote: post #15

I loved Geocities, the idea was unique and had depth that was visible. I chose area51 and eventually filled my page with midi files

All the good stuff was in Area51

Area51/Rampart here. It was a better, simpler time.

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#54

Post by evanjrowley »

krapp wrote: post #42
p3rls wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think of technical and nontechnical as a spectrum, the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals. And there was only so much to learn, too, at least as far as web development went-- not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database. Today I think those types of nontechnical people are pursuing far more lucrative niches in product management, de…

> the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals. I don't know. There are kids making games in Roblox now, editing movies and doing all kinds of things, but Hacker News would still consider them "nontechnical" because they have social media accounts.

Today I explained to a sales engineer working at a Fortune 500 company how to open an Incognito window in Google Chrome.

Maybe the inflection point was the transition between Windows XP and Windows Vista. In XP, the default behavior was to show file extentions in Windows file explorer. In subsequent Windown releases, file extentions for known file types were hidden by default. This led to future generations being less capable of identifying common file formats. Computer illiteracy has been snowballing ever since.

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#55

Post by chneu »

canjobear wrote: post #39
kalleboo wrote: post #10

One thing nobody remembers (or at least never writes about in these retrospectives) from the early days of Geocities is you literally had to virtually "walk" up and down "blocks" in the the "neighborhoods" to find a "vacant lot" to put your site in. When I initially tried to sign up, they had some beta of a "vacant lot finder" cgi form that didn't work. It wasn't like these days where you just sign up and get an acco…

It was a nice way to organize things so you could find stuff serendipitously. I remember clicking around in my neighborhood (where I had my N64 cheat codes website) and finding some cool website with lots of slick looking 3D renders. It's rare to stumble across unplanned-for things like that nowadays.

I miss stumbleupon quite a bit. There are similar services but the web itself just doesn't seem to function the same so the websites don't quite hit the same.

Cloudhiker kind of fills the niche but it just isn't the same.

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#56

Post by erikerikson »

krapp wrote: post #42
p3rls wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think of technical and nontechnical as a spectrum, the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals. And there was only so much to learn, too, at least as far as web development went-- not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database. Today I think those types of nontechnical people are pursuing far more lucrative niches in product management, de…

> the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals. I don't know. There are kids making games in Roblox now, editing movies and doing all kinds of things, but Hacker News would still consider them "nontechnical" because they have social media accounts.

As opposed to having Hacker News accounts ;P

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#57

Post by pabs3 »

selcuka wrote: post #46
kalleboo wrote: post #10

One thing nobody remembers (or at least never writes about in these retrospectives) from the early days of Geocities is you literally had to virtually "walk" up and down "blocks" in the the "neighborhoods" to find a "vacant lot" to put your site in. When I initially tried to sign up, they had some beta of a "vacant lot finder" cgi form that didn't work. It wasn't like these days where you just sign up and get an acco…

There is a partial archive at https://www.oocities.org/

More archives listed on here:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Geocities

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#58

Post by pabs3 »

pkorzeniewski wrote: post #9

You can browse through archived GeoCities websites on The Geocities Gallery [0] I get a warm feeling looking through all these "home pages", they feel so much more genuine and personal than anything found on modern social media. [0] https://geocities.restorativland.org/

More archives are listed here:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Geocities

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#60

Post by OldOneEye »

andvaribekho wrote: post #24

I loved Sailor moon in the 90s and made My first website in notepad in 1997 about my fav Sailor scout https://web.archive.org/web/19991001193925/http://www.geocit... It was so exciting to find a new comment in your guestbook

I love your website!

Of course, not for the content itself, but because it's really a time capsule of the feelings and hopes of our time, back then, when we were teens, discovering this new exciting thing called Internet, the excitement of meeting like minded people and have discussions that you could never have with your friends.

I feel like nothing is ever gonna replicate that excitement anymore, but that may be more related to us being 40+ than the technology not being available xD

Geocities/Lycos/others, then switching to phpbb forums that you modded and where you had your first programming experiences to try to build games...great innocent times all around, before everything was enshittified for commercial purposes.

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