DouglasWard.net Random ramblings from an IT Director

I remember setting up my first Geocities webpage back when I was in college.  In 1995 anyone who could make their own webpage was some kind of technical wizard.  I spent a lot of time hand coding html files with a text editor.  Creating a website is a completely different process now.

This is the week that Geocities went dark forever.  There is no backup or spare copy.  It’s simply gone.  With it goes a big portion of the history of the internet.  That is a true shame.  Lucky for us some people saved at least some of it for historical purposes.

When Yahoo! switched off the servers for GeoCities, the Web posting service, on Oct. 27, some 7 million of the Internet’s first websites went dark forever. The bulk of these were people’s personal home pages, which were pulled offline with no backup and no permanent record of those users’ frenetic early forays online.

Now a ragtag effort by several groups of budding computer historians is feverishly — and angrily — trying to bring as much as they can back online.

…

ArchiveTeam is still sorting through the data, but Scott estimates that he was able to save more than a million accounts, which translates to more than 2 terabytes of data (about 20 average computer hard drives). And he wasn’t alone — Scott says that four or five others were working to save GeoCities. One of these people, Jacques Mattheij, managed to get nearly 2 million accounts, operating just eight machines out of the Netherlands.

I’m surprised there wasn’t some deal struck with Archive.org or some other institution.  At least someone is doing something.  Kudos to the Archive Team!