For many people, Geocities — the free web hosting service that was launched in 1994, acquired by Yahoo in 1999, and quietly put to rest a decade later — was the first time they’d created something online. For some, it may also have been the last time they had near-total control over what a web page looked like and contained. The hand-built “Web 1.0” style that Geocities pages and other early websites sport is a relic of a time when the web felt smaller, sillier, and a little more human.
Geocities Forever has taught the machines to speak in ‘90s web design
“I died - Surfing Further.”
“I died - Surfing Further.”
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
Geocities Forever, an experiment by web developer Aanand Prasad, is delightfully inhuman. It’s as if a long-obsolete Java Applet suddenly gained self-awareness and began trying to communicate through the only language it had seen humankind deploy: rotted pages of nesting tables, scrolling marquees, blurry clip art, eye-searing background colors, and other material culled from the OoCities project, which frantically archived some 2 million Geocities pages just ahead of its shutdown. I’m not quite sure what it’s trying to say, but it’s become surprisingly fluent in haphazardly executed, half-broken ‘90s web design.
There’s a repository of the project for the curious, and each generated page has a unique link — if anyone understands the importance of archival, it’s early web fans. Or, as Geocities Forever puts it:
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