End of Another Era

It was announced months ago, but it has now come to pass. GeoCities is no more.

As if I didn't feel old enough already. Now I feel really old.

One of the fancy-dancy technological wonders of my early adulthood - one in which I played a small part – has disappeared. It was my first real foray into the World-Wide Web, that bizarre offshoot of the Internet which we at Boeing first noticed around 1993. One of the guys (Scott, you know who you are!) brought in this really cool “Mosaic” browser program which we could run on Windows 3.1, and we played around with this new HyperText Markup Language (HTML) which allowed us to “publish” our documents across the company intranet. And Scott figured out how to access a few interesting external Internet sites.

After Boeing laid everybody off at the end of the 777 program, we all went out and found new jobs, and I happened to end up at Microsoft, helping with the launch of Windows 95 and the Microsoft Network (MSN), running data mining tools on the back-end servers for what promised to be a huge money-making machine for Mr. Gates.

It was a marvelous experience. Having spent ten years in the bureaucratic system that was Boeing, now enjoying the wonders of working in Redmond - the beautiful, ever-changing, ever-expanding campus, the incredible food, the camaraderie of fellow software geeks, the toys, the video games in every corner of the building, the free sodas and popcorn, the toss-'em-in, sink-or-swim attitude of management - and being on the forefront of the web explosion, when the web was suddenly exploding beyond the limited domain of engineers and academia and opening up to the entire world. We were all excited, like children with a new toy.

One day somebody emailed the team about this new site, GeoPages or something, which allowed people to 'homestead' on the web, establish their own little website on the Frontier. It sounded kinda corny, and kinda cool, all at the same time.Sure, MSN was giving away sites, too, but they were wanting something for the privilege. GeoPages/Cities was free. And it was set up like neighborhoods, where you settled in a place with other people who had the same interests. (For some reason, I was in the political discussion area.)

And what did we put on our wonderful websites? ('We' in the general sense)

Utterly boring, self-referential essays about ourselves. Pictures of our families, or our cats or dogs. MIDI files, endlessly repetitive. Funny original stories that weren't good enough for real publication. Other funny stories we'd "borrowed" from other places. Links to everywhere, using link buttons (left, right, up, down) throughout. All the news that was fit to print, and all available at the incredible speed of 14400 kilobaud! Man, we were cooking!

I wish I'd kept copies of those website files around someplace. I might actually have some of them on an old floppy disk somewhere. But it's been nearly fifteen years. Not sure if they're still even readable.

[I checked. They're still readable. But, oh, so embarrassing!]

After that, things changed quickly. The Internet became ubiquitous, our PCs got faster, our network connections got faster, our lives got complicated. It became impossible to keep up with it all, especially to write pithy little notes about (complete with pictures!).

Not even the introduction of the blogosphere could help with that problem. Sure, now it was insanely easy to maintain a presence on the Web. Yet, still, there just aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done, and unfortunately, anything that requires real effort (as HTML often does) must go by the wayside. One by one, all the various websites we were attempting to maintain, became stale, unused, un-maintained. GeoCities was the last non-blog site to go. And then Yahoo! announced that the site would be going away.

I'll miss it, though. It was relatively easy to create cool websites, even with the size/space restrictions (although when they put the embedded ads in and crippled all the user-embedded scripting, it wasn't nearly as cool as it once was). I kept mine very simple, very sparse, as low-impact as possible (partially due to the size restrictions imposed on the users by Yahoo!). And it kept the family up-to-date (mostly) with pictures of the kids, the cats, etc.

But then Blogger came along, and Facebook, and other sites which made it easy just to type words and upload pictures. So why bother writing HTML from scratch anymore?

Oh, well. Time marches on. Progress continues. Entropy grows.