I just found out that Geocities, one of the oldest free web hosting services on the net, started way back in 1995, is shutting down.
For those of us who've been on the net that long, it's one of those things that's just always been there, one of those places where anyone could create a website and therefore, a general eyesore and a big fat joke. I never really put much on mine, never made a real site out of it. A couple of the goofy animations I made over the years are on youtube now, but there were a few things I never posted anywhere else, like the flash game I shared a link to just last week.
The "cities" of Geocities were originally larger categories into which users could place their websites. It's one of those cheesy things, like AOL keywords, from people who thought the web would always be as small and simple as it used to be.
They haven't used those categories in ten years, but I called my little domain Ethusia, intending that to be the setting for a series of stories I'd started writing late in the year 2000, stories I had the vague idea I would post online. It's taken me a while to come back to that idea, but I'd forgotten how long it's been on my mind.
A piece of internet history is going away when they take down those old sites, a record of those mid-nineties days when the promises of cyberpunk were all about to come true with the emergence of this "world wide web" thing.
I've always imagined, since computer storage capacities have been growing geometrically for so long, that our old data would always stay in the system, forever accessible, continuously transfered onto new formats where huge files would become like drops in a bucket. Remember when every floppy disk you'd ever owned could suddenly be burned onto a single CD? Or the revolution when every CD you'd ever owned could be ripped and packed onto an i-something as small as a deck of cards? Even those first ipods seem huge in retrospect. I walk around with movies in my pocket now, just because I can.
We've got until October 26th to copy our files elsewhere. Today I sent myself every file I ever posted on geocities in a single email, so they'd always be somewhere on the internet, my inbox. From there, who knows? Maybe it's time for my own domain.
