The End of History

So Yahoo has announced that they are pulling the plug on GeoCities, one of the earliest free web hosting sites on the internet. It's been years, and fallen by the wayside, and modern social sites such as Facebook and Myspace have filled the role it once held: for people to have personal pages.

Like probably a lot of the web developers around my age, the legacy of GeoCities is something that has affected me. Years ago, so far back that the Internet Archive doesn't have any records of it, I had a page on GeoCities. It started out as a hosting of an - I believe - 8th Grade computer class that had HTML development as part of the course. An age past, where I had a StarTrek.com e-mail address as my personal e-mail, before that was shut down, and I was only beginning to learn.

Much like the beginning of anyone at the time, the site was atrocious. Anyone who used the internet in those days can remember rampant proliferation of animated GIF-heavy sites, which were just absolutely horrid to look at. I was no exception, here, in the first days of learning how to code, Animated GIF's and <MARQUEE> tags in a barely-readable site. If I remember, the site was just talking about some of the pre-release images from Pokemon Gold & Silver, and had a MIDI of the FF2 (the NES one) Overworld theme playing in the background.

We've come a long ways since those days, and the face of the internet has evolved drastically. And now, all we can do is watch, as one of our oldest still-living ancestors passes to the grave, and salute in silence. It gave us the push, brought us to where we are today, and without it the user-based Internet might have been a very different place. A salute to GeoCities, a symbol of our past.