I’m not really sure what brought this about today, but somehow I came across this site that took on the herculean task of archiving Geocities when Yahoo! opted to shut the site down a couple of years ago. Being the programming geek that I am, I especially got a kick out of the play-by-play making of page where the admin walks through the steps that were made at the last minute to archive a site as incredibly massive as Geocities was … we’re talking 38 million pages (according to Wikipedia) and the guy was pulling upwards of 150 Mbps across a cluster of 5 servers at their prime – not exactly child’s play with the home cable modem, that’s for sure!
Anyways, aside from it being a neat tech tale just seeing what all went into the project from a homebrewed technical perspective, it also got me wondering about my own Geocities page(s) from way back in the day, probably circa 1995-ish or so. Although granted they didn’t have a lot of traffic so they might not have even gotten picked up for archival in the first place, it kind of sucks that I honestly don’t really have any way to check because I don’t even remember what the addresses were anymore! All of that was way prior to Google, so no such luck there, and the telnet-based host that I first used for e-mail cut my account off for 3-months of non-usage right around the time when webmail started becoming a thing, so no e-mail archives to sift through there, either.
Given how big a part of my life publishing on the web has become since then, it seems kind of weird for those first couple of years to just be lost forever, even though they’d be abysmally frightening to look at considering they were slapped together by a 15 year-old who was still in the extremely early stages of beginning to explore his own creativity in a public setting. I do remember that they covered a lot of really random stuff that I was interested in at the time – I had a page for The Muppets, some guitar tabs, links to the MUDs that I had been playing, and a bunch of stuff about Magic: The Gathering and D&D … although I guess you could say that I basically am still doing the same thing today, just with slightly different topics!
If anybody can think of a way to hunt down the address of an old Geocities account, do let me know! I have a vague recollection of what the “street numbers” might’ve been, but I couldn’t find anything under the couple of “neighborhoods” that would’ve made sense in the few archives that exist.
Update: I tried doing a Google search for my old Geocities e-mail address, but the only results I got were two hits where it was being passed around on a SPAM list… 🙁