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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.