GeoCities

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 1994 · Beverly Hills, California (geocities.com) · Also known as Yahoo! GeoCities; Beverly Hills Internet; GeoPages

What it is

GeoCities was a free website host that ran from 1994 to 2009. Anyone could sign up and get a few megabytes of space on its computers for their own homepage, which anyone else on the internet could visit. Early on, each page was filed in a themed 'neighbourhood' named after a place, such as SiliconValley for computers or Hollywood for films, and given a numbered street address. Most pages were made by ordinary people writing the code themselves.

Where it came from

David Bohnett and John Rezner started it in late 1994 in Beverly Hills, California, as Beverly Hills Internet. In mid-1995 it began offering free 2 MB homepages, and its users were called Homesteaders. It became GeoCities in December 1995, signed up its millionth Homesteader in October 1997 and listed on the stock market in 1998. Yahoo bought it in January 1999 for a reported $3.57 billion in stock, near the peak of the dot-com bubble. Yahoo's new terms claimed rights over everything users had posted, and it backed down after people started leaving. Users drifted to newer sites like MySpace and Facebook, and Yahoo shut the US service on 26 October 2009. The Japanese version ran until March 2019.

How people used it

People made pages about their families, their pets, their favourite bands and TV shows, and their own poems. Most were learning to write web code as they went, so the pages shared a look: tiled starry backgrounds, animated pictures of flames and spinning envelopes, music that played as soon as the page opened, and a yellow 'Under Construction' sign with a little man digging. A hit counter showed how many visitors had come. Visitors were expected to sign the guestbook, and pages on the same subject joined webrings, so you could click 'next' through every Star Trek fan page in the ring.

Why it mattered

For many people it was the first time they'd published anything a stranger could read. You didn't need money or permission, just patience. The fan shrines and family pages it hosted made up a large share of what the early web actually contained. When Yahoo announced the closure, volunteers including Jason Scott's Archive Team copied as much as they could and in 2010 released it as one download of roughly 640 GB. That rescue made GeoCities the usual example people give of how much of the web disappears when one company switches it off.

The jokes around it

• 'This page is under construction', shown on pages that stayed that way for a decade.
• 'You are visitor number 000047', the hit counter at the bottom of the page.
• 'Please sign my guestbook.'
• 'Best viewed in Netscape Navigator at 800x600.'
• Later 'GeoCities aesthetic' retro designs, copying the flames and tiled backgrounds on purpose.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Given free space and no rules about how it should look, people built pages that were ugly, personal and sincere, and kept them up for years. They also assumed the company would host them for ever, and few kept their own copies until Yahoo announced the closure.

What noah is not sure of

The 38 million page figure is as reported and may count differently from other estimates. The Archive Team release is often given as about 641 GB; I've rounded it. Some reports value the Yahoo deal differently from $3.57 billion because the stock price moved between announcement and completion. The founding month (November 1994) comes from the specimen text.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.