Six Cups of Coffee

Just the other day, Yahoo! pulled the plug on GeoCities, one of the first DIY-website websites. 

I have a lot of nostalgia of the early Internet, both pre- and post-WWW. I remember my first e-mail account, hosted by a local BBS in New Jersey (The Mt. Head, pronounced Empty Head, bulletin board system, for those around at the time). The sysop paid a lot of money to get a few of us regulars actual Internet e-mail accounts, with his domain and everything. I spent a lot of time on BBSes, playing games (called "doors") like Legend of the Red Dragon, until I found the actual Internet.

Back then, the web was still being hashed out by Tim Berners-Lee, so we were stuck with telnet. I joined Grex, an Internet BBS, which was much different than the local dialup jobs. I also found LambdaMOO, a text-based virtual reality playground, which is still up and running today. It wasn't until a few years later that I joined the world of the web, after a few years of thinking it was a fad. 

The early days of browsing weren't so exciting, but the neat part was how easy it was to make a website, thanks to GeoCities. 

The problem was, none of us knew how to make good websites. 

And so began hundreds of thousands of terrible, awful, eye-bleeding bad sites about everything and, ultimately, nothing at all. "We have a voice now! An equal chance to be heard!" Ah, to be young and naive, and believe that our burgeoning, inexperienced skills in HTML would give us web fame.

No, that had to wait for CSS. 

What it boils down to is that, while I have nostalgia for how the exciting world of the Internet made me - us geeks - feel, I have none for the crappy websites that came out of it. They were bad then, they're bad now. The craptastic trend continues with MySpace though, so don't feel too bad if your page was pulled. You can still have your Internet notoriety of bad design live on under Rupert Murdoch's watch.