Geocities - The End

Sometime in the next 24 hours, Geocities is expected to stop serving webpages forever. For those that don't know what a Geocities is, read on.

In the mid to late 90s, Geocities was the premier free web site service organized into communities. I used to own a Geocities account. Originally it was located at http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Cockpit/8423/index2.html, a part of the science and technology community. (Unfortunately this site no longer exists due to an account issue I had in the early 2000s, by no fault of Yahoo's.) I remember the e-mail I received telling me that my quota had been upgraded from 13 MB to 14 MB, and then a couple years later when Yahoo! purchased Geocities. Geocities was not only where I first played with a website over a 28.8k dial-up connection, but it was also the source of the first password I ever used (randomly generated but constructed in an easy-to-remember way), and is actually a password that I still use to this day, albeit usually with variations.

To commemorate the end of Geocities, XKCD modified their website layout to match one that might be seen on a Geocities page; it is also archived here.

We will miss your historical significance, Geocities.

Screen Candy

Back in the old Windows 95 days, when I was but a wee child in elementary school, there were a handful of fun screen candy applications. One of them was Neko, a cat that would chase your mouse cursor around the screen. I rediscovered it online here, but since that's a Geocities site, and Yahoo! is shutting down Geocities later this year, it's nice to know that archive.org has a copy of the site.

There's also Screen Mates Pumpkin and Sheep. They walk around your screen and use window edges as platforms. Here's a site that seems to have downloads for them, although it says Orange instead of Pumpkin (the original Japanese website for Screen Mates no longer seems available). I think my copies of the programs are from the days when floppies were the way to share programs :)