Hearing the news last week that Yahoo! is shutting the doors to the Geocities community made me quite sad. While it is true that I haven’t used Geocities since they were acquired by Yahoo! (I’ll get to that in a minute) it still makes me sad that it’s going away.
Back in the spring of 1996, I was in my senior year of high school. Our school had jut gotten the internet in the form of an ISDN line. To make a long story short, I ended up coding my first website ever by building a full website for our school’s newspaper. This was all handcrafted HTML, and from that first fateful page, I was hooked.
After graduation, I worked the summer in anticipation of going to college in August. Still feeling the thrill of doing and maintaining that website, I wanted to do a site of my own. The problem was that I didn’t have a server like the school did to host the site. Remember, this was back in 1996 and we were all on dial-up connections and cheap computer was considered anything under $1500, so hosting it from home on a spare machine quite frankly didn’t exist! After searching the web, Geocities was not only one of the only games out there offering free hosting, but they let you have full access, meaning you weren’t constrained to use prefab templates.
Finding a host was the easy part, now it was time to find something to make a page about. Blogs really didn’t exist back then like they do now, and moblogs weren’t even thought of yet given that we were surfing the net on ultra-fast 28.8 baud modems. After some thinking, I came to a most logical conclusion. I would make a site dedicated to the one thing me and all my friends were obsessed over for the entire length of our senior year — Highlander!
I thew together a website and maintained it for a few months until college really started to take its toll on me. In the spring of 1997 I left college due to the school not offering any real degrees I was interested in, and started working full time in sales. After a while, I honestly forgot all about that page. By 2001, I owned Twev1701.com, had my own dedicated hosting, and beyond what Geocities offered.
I did think about my page once during that time though. In January 1999, I got an email from Geocities letting me know they had been acquired by Yahoo!. Shortly after that email, I received a nice welcome email from Yahoo! letting me know that the username and web address I had for the past 3 years had to be changed since they were merging the Geocities users with its own userbase. No longer was I ‘The_Gathering’. No, I had to change my name to ‘The_Gathering_1999′. That’s when I officially turned my back on Geocities, and quite frankly, never went back.
However, I still remember that site fondly and have great memories of my early days cutting my teeth on HTML. I would code like a mad man in Notepad and do my image editing in Paint Shop Pro. To that end, I have tracked down all the original code, images, and contect from that site. I present this to you, in it’s original form. No modernizing, no George Lucas ‘reimaging’. This is how the site looked after its last update on January 2, 1997. Enjoy!
Click to go back to 1997!
