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A comment by xian to my post about MS FrontPage gelled a quasi-idea for a post about one of the precursors to modern blog sites.

[caption id="attachment_527" align="alignnone" width="497"] A tasteful example of an old GeoCities homepage.[/caption]

GeoCities.com was a real watershed phenomenon. It was an American Internet Service Provider which came into being with the Web, in late 1994, and gave people Internet access, and their own personal Web sites. When Yahoo, who'd owned it since 1999, shut the U.S. part down, there were at least 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities. (■) Compare that with the leading modern free blog site: As of 2012, it was estimated that about half of the world-wide total of 72.4 million wordpress sites were hosted on wordpress.com. (■) That's 36.2 million. GeoCities success is still staggering, and it arguably led directly to Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere.

What follows will be a bit of a history lesson for some. A lot of it was part of my life.

Who knows why ordinary people wanted to access computer networks from the comfort of their own home? A similar impulse probably led to the invention of Haggis.

The "when" is pinned down as Feb 16, 1978, according to Wired magazine, when Ward Christensen and Randy Suess launched the first public dial-up bulletin board system. They announced it in the November 1978 issue of Byte magazine, titled "The Sky's the Limit," available at Internet Archives.

Little blog cabins everywhere

BBSs thrived until the mid-1990s, and the World Wide Web. They were often hosted on ordinary PCs with very limited ability to handle concurrent users. A BBS was roughly analogous to a modern Website: files to download, and moderated discussions. They were usually labours of love, dedicated to a special interest.

All connections were dial-up over the phone system;  slow and noisy, and long distance charges applied. Most BBSs were little more than one-room shacks. Worse still, the mainstream typified BBSs-as-a-whole, as a sort of bad neighbourhood, populated by hackers and pirates -- not a family-friendy destination.

Enter the Online Services

In the place of bad neighbourhoods full of seedy, one-room shacks, some developers built big, self-contained gated communities: CompuServe (1979-2009), Delphi (1981-presnt), Prodigy (1984-2013?), America Online (AOL, 1985-present), to name the major ones. Apple had eWorld (1994-1996).

They were money-sieves. In 1993 I was on CompuServe (CIS), which was on slow dial-up and cost $7 USD-per-hour, On top of that was a tier of value-added, pay-as-you-go features. A lot of Music types in Vancouver were on CIS then, and it wasn't unheard of for them to blow $500 USD-a-month on it. A version: CompuServe 2000, exists but I'm not sure what it is now.

Although I had a state-of-moment 14.4 modem (14.4 KB-per-second), in 1993, CIS only supported 9600 (9.6 KB per-second), so a 30 KB GIF file seemed quite large. My first Internet ISP at the end of 1993 supported 14.4, and, well Yippey-Ki-Yay ...!

Together the Online Information Services helped pave the Information Superhighway, and pioneered techniques still embedded in the online experience, particularly the money-making ones. However the Internet made them irrelevant as online services overnight.

One protocol to rule them all: The Internet

In the beginning was the Void -- with vague systems floating about: eMail, Usenet, FTP,  WAIS, Gopher. Information could move between them in a particular form, or protocol, so they could act as a network of networks: the Internet. This sure wasn't CompuServe -- for instance, where was the light switch?

In 1994 the first Web browser, Mosaic allowed access to the new World Wide Web (Oh, there's the switch!). The Web gave focus and form to all the possibilities of the Net. People just got it. BBSs vanished, or became Web sites. Online Information Services died or bought into other businesses.

The Internet was the most violent revolution which never killed anyone. Oh I'm sure there were some heart attacks when people discovered how fast their modems could transfer data; how long distance charges did not apply; how it cost a fraction of anything before it (sound of drooling).

Everything before had been pre-packaged content at a premium; the Web offered people the possibility to create their own content for next to nothing. Heck, they hadn't even known they wanted to do that!

The Internet is like a box of chocolates city

In the mid-1990s the English language was working around-the-clock to air-bag against all the future shock. As one line of talk had "bricks-and-mortar" businesses moving to the ethereal plane of e-commerce, another was papering the Internet with bricks-and-mortar metaphors. The best fit seemed to be a city, with its physical infrastructure of streets, traffic, buildings, plumbing, and the like.

GeoCites.com, was innovative, in that it combined a bunch of available things in a way that made a completely new thing.

GeoCities.com started in late 1994 as an Internet Service Provider (ISP), what was special was that they gave people not just Internet access but also personal Websites. And like Topsy, they just grow'd, and grow'd. Here's their Wiki-history.

Their name came from the way they had users categorize their home-pages in city and neighbourhood categories -- a computer site belonged in Silicon Valley, and so on.

GeoCities' explosive success coincided with, what you might call the "Web browser wars." The original browser, credited with helping popularize the Web was NCSA Mosaic (1993-1997). The graphic user interface it pioneered is still the basis of all Web browsers, largely because both Netscape and Internet Explorer are based on it. Netscape Navigator (1994-2007), the dominant browser of the 1990s was developed by a co-creator of Mosaic. Netscape was ultimately brought down by Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE, 1995-present). While Microsoft's platform dominance made it a foregone conclusion, IE also competed hard with features and stability. IE will always exist. Netscape lives on through the Mozilla foundation which the founder set up, and which led to the Firefox browser.

Cities in flame with blink, blink, blink

In their heyday, both Netscape and IE played at popularizing proprietary HTML tags, which were responsible for the look of Web pages. Both example which come to mind were from Netscape: the "blink" tag and "frames." The former was harmless bling, but the latter was a real pain, and quite controversial. I mention these because GeoCities' multi-million ordinary users were all about "blink," and "frames," and, every day, were seen by many to be redefining bad taste, and bending, breaking, or just ignoring every rule of design and readability. The also, collectively set some kind of unbeatable record for the use of the word "shrine."

GeoCities themselves, could be tacky. In June 1998, they added a controversial floating GeoCities logo watermark. It was deemed an ugly intrusion by many, and the fact that its Java code wasn't supported by all browsers didn't impress either.

The millions of GeoCities users created, shared, and networked a storm. They were a test-bed for the future. Everything which social media Websites cater to, every core feature of blogger and wordpress began can probably be traced back to the roiling glorious primordial slime that was GeoCities.com. And you can't help but notice that today's personal blog sites, are almost never as scary-looking as their ancestral counterparts. It's like we got that out of our system, so that's another thing to thank the GeoCities pioneers for.

When Yahoo decided to pull the plug on GeoCities, in 2009, not everyone sat idly by. A group called The Archive Team sprang into hurried action and ripped as much GeoCities content as they could. The result is still available to this day as surely one of the largest torrents in history. Here's a taste.

Or try the The Geocities-izer on any site, Bwa-ha!

The "Enter" homepage image came from here.
The <blink> graphic came from here.