Geocities Archive and the Death of Digital
Geocities and the loss of 38 million sites
Coming from Generation X I can remember a time before the Internet. I was what you call an early adopter first getting connected in 1994 via a 14.4 dial up modem. I’m sure I am in good company when I reminisce about the screeching sound of the dial up modem, the fight about who could use the phone (Dial up access required exclusive use of the phone connection) and the anticipation of downloading a 5 megabyte game demo over several hours; how times have changed.
With my monthly dial up service I was entitled to a whopping 2 megabytes of personal web space where I could put whatever I wanted. The trick was mastering the (at the time) cryptic nuances of HTML using a text editor. One I had mastered the basics I was able to put up as many pages full of spinning images and tiled backgrounds as my personal web space would allow.
Early one morning a friend showed me how I could use Netscape Navigator to edit pages using a “What you see is what you get” otherwise known as a WYSIWYG editor, my mind was blown. My production of badly formatted, tiled background, spinning image pages increased tenfold and I needed much more hosting space away from what my personal hosting could supply; things were getting serious.
The search for more space where I could pollute the Internet with my newly found “Web Designs” (I use that in the loosest terms possible) lead me to sign up with Geocities.
About Geocities
Geocities for those of you who do not know, was a web hosting service that launched in 1994 and closed in in 2009 after being acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for just over 3.5 billion dollars in Yahoo! stock. Geocities allowed people to create their own area of the Internet long before Facebook was a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. Flashing backgrounds, guest books, rotating images and pictures of people’s pets in various positions were the order of the day and it was extremely popular. Before being closed by Yahoo! in 2009 Geocities boasted over 38 million users and was one of the most popular websites on the planet.
Closure of Geocities
In October 2009 Yahoo closed Geocities for good and with it fifteen years of early web history was lost forever. With the simple flick of a switch 38 million user’s data disappeared with no real recourse for getting any of it back. Aware of the pending closure of Geocities, a group called the archive team did their very best to back up as many accounts as possible before the closure; they did an outstanding job.
With the closure of Geocities it showed just how volatile and prone to loss digital data is. 38 million user accounts were gone forever in a matter of seconds. If we do some simple math and say that each person spent an average of five hours on their site (And this is being extremely conservative) with the switching off of the Geocities servers one hundred and ninety million (190 000 000) hours of work was gone forever; or to put it in a different perspective collectively twenty one thousand years (21 689) of work disappeared.
The amount of hours work that disappeared on a corporate whim is one thing but when you dig deeper and realize that people lost precious photos, stories and other media the death of Geocities is even more sad. Remember this was the early Internet and there really was no real public cloud storage and I am sure that many people did not have backup plans in place.
Loss of Digital Media
Moving forward, how many people today actually take the time to perform regular backups of their previous data? Many people rely on “the cloud” for ensuring that their precious memories are kept safe forever. With security breaches occurring all the time it’s entirely possible for a malicious person to delete all of your files once they have access. How many people use the same password for all of their online account activity? At an educated guess I would say far too many; the point here is that online backups can also be deleted in an instant.
How many of you have had friends who have lost their phone or digital camera? How many of those people not only lost their phone or digital camera but also lost all of the photos on the device? All those previous memories gone forever with absolutely no chance of ever getting them back; a modern tragedy. There are constant articles appearing in the news or posts on Social Media from people begging for their phone back or asking how to retrieve irreplaceable files off a corrupted device.
We are alive in the first generation of the truly digital age yet due to ease and complacently we are all at risk of losing years of our digital history. There have been attempts by many organizations such as the archive team (Who have archived billions of websites via the Way Back Machine or the Geocities Archive project but these attempts are no way complete.
So, what to do? Other than backing up your precious memories to digital media and to cloud services make a hard copy. Remember photo albums? Those quaint little books that sat pride of place on coffee tables throughout the world and were handed down through generations? Take the time to print out your photos and create a physical legacy that cannot be deleted on a corporate whim.
