Back in the 90's, everyone wanted their own little corner of the web, and thanks to geocities, tripod, and angelfire, anyone could. Like, literally anyone. You could just jump in and.. make a site. About Christmas. Your DJ side business. Whatever you watched on Saturday mornings.
There was something for everyone - auto-playing midis, nauseating color schemes, animated everything, visitor counters, ... just toss everything you can dream up in a hat, shake it up, and dump it all out on every page. Sigh. Those were the days.
I didn't save these sites 25 years ago in the event I started a blog though. Nonono.. you too can browse the best the 90's had to offer! Sites like geocities.ws and oocities.org were quicker than the rest of us (well, I don't know about you, but me anyway), and scooped up a ton of sites after yahoo announced the party was over.
My first website was hosted on geocities back in the 90's, and was all about one of the most successful console games ever.. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I must've played it through a couple dozen times, and eventually wrote up a walkthrough of it with pictures and everything. My corner. My contribution.
I cared about it so much that, even though I remember editing and uploading static files using CuteHTML and CuteFTP (oh wow, they're still available.. wonder if CuteHTML supports React and jQuery now), I didn't hang on to a copy of the site. That's really unfortunate.. seriously, it's everyone's loss. It probably looked like Sheila's Shellter up there, but with a different web ring and, uh.. called The Canon of Ganon or something clever. On second thought, it died a good death.
Even further back
Geocities was hardly the beginning of the web though. And as amazing as it is that those sites are still around, did you know the very first site ever is online too, just as it was from 30 years ago? It's amazing.. a few pages that basically linked to the entirety of the Internet at the time. You didn't need google, just a sheet of paper!
If you want to learn more, CERN (where the web was born) dedicated some space of their own to tell the story of the birth of the web.
The first website at CERN – and in the world – was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. In 2013, CERN launched a project to restore this first ever website: info.cern.ch.
On 30 April 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. Later, CERN made a release available with an open licence, a more sure way to maximise its dissemination. These actions allowed the web to flourish.
It's fun to checkout the awful pages of Geocities, but this is real history.