GeoCities shut down last week, vaporizing all those cheesy ’90s Web sites. Does that even really matter?

The ’90s are over. Like, really over. Even more over now than they were a week ago. Back in April, Yahoo! Inc. — owner of the once-very-popular Web-hosting site GeoCities — announced it would shut GeoCities down on Oct. 26, annihilating 15 years of personal Web sites made by millions of people all over the world. This was ’90s Internet history, a time when the Internet wasn’t as sophisticated and hadn’t yet begun to ruin whole industries. GeoCities represented an era; amateur designers and avid hobbyists and Internet enthusiasts made Web pages that, compared with today, were primitive, endearing and earnest. Unless the makers of these sites made copies of or signed up for Yahoo!’s paid hosting service, all of that history seems to be gone.

GeoCities was one of the first, and one of the most popular, free Web-hosting services on the Internet. Begun in 1994, the site was originally called “Beverly Hills Internet,” but was renamed “GeoCities” in 1995 for the way the sites under its domain were organized into “neighborhood” directories. “Hollywood” was for sites centering on movies and entertainment. “EnchantedForest” was for kids’ stuff, “NapaValley” was for wine, “Wellesley” for topics relating to women, “Petsburgh” for pets, “Area51” for science fiction and fantasy, and so on.

Because of the neighborhood thing, GeoCities users became known as “Homesteaders,” and there were a million of them by 1997. Many pages were shrines to various cultural niches, with rudimentary, cartoony and chintzy designs, graphics and fonts. Other pages dedicated content to a specific subject, like speaking the Hawaiian language, or 20th-century Polish history. And many others were personal profiles and portfolios, with kind of a MySpace feel to them: rants, blogs, pictures, interests, etc. These sites took, like, minutes to load; the MIDI computerized-music files and bouncing animated GIFs were hilarious, but broadband-challenging.

Dan Flynn, from Franklin, Mass., was a GeoCities user in high school. Flynn is an illustrator for Soup2Nuts, a production company in Watertown, Mass., and his high-school GeoCities account was a collection of the drawings and artwork he worked on as a teenager.

“I remember GeoCities back in the ’90s, when you had to code everything yourself,” he wrote in an e-mail. “And you couldn’t just make a domain name yourself. You had a page of house icons, and each house would be ‘occupied’ by someone … and you had to skim through dozens of pages until you came across the inevitable ‘house for sale,’ where you could set up your own Web page. Good times.”

In 1999, Yahoo! bought GeoCities and screwed a bunch of things up. They changed the terms of service, declaring themselves sole owners of all GeoCities user-generated content, but later modified those terms when Homesteaders revolted. Then in 2001, Yahoo! implemented a monthly limit on data transfer, which basically meant that if too many people logged onto your site within a month, your site would stop working, unless you upgraded to a paid account. By this time, GeoCities was losing steam, and around 2003, many users’ sites had stopped working, having been forgotten, retired or abandoned for newer technology.

It’s not hard to believe GeoCities stopped making any money. It slipped into technological obsolescence at least five years ago. With Facebook, et al., and with significant improvements in, and higher expectations for, Web design, GeoCities is irrelevant, ugly and limiting, and requires some basic knowledge of code. (Compare it with a site like Tumblr that requires virtually no knowledge of code at all. All you do is plug in your e-mail address and password, then pick a template — you look like a pro.) GeoCities got old and became high-maintenance.

Imagine if you got an e-mail tomorrow that said in six months your Facebook account would totally evaporate unless you started paying for it. As it is right now, every time Facebook modifies its home page, people start freaking out and joining One-Million-Strong-Against-Facebook groups. If Facebook shut down, there’d be bloodshed.

David Deyette, an East Hartford 26-year-old who started his GeoCities site when he was 17, was concise in his thoughts about the shutdown.

“It’s clearly the end of an era,” he wrote in an e-mail. He has nostalgia, but “it is the sort reserved for Surge [soda] or ‘Spider-Man Unlimited.’ In a way, one has to be glad it’s all gone,” he wrote. Like Deyette, many are eager to have this proof of their adolescence eliminated and safe from Google’s search crawl.

Clive Thompson, who writes frequently about Internet culture and trends as a columnist for Wired and a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, said in an e-mail that what interested him about the shut-down is the way it “highlights the weird differences between computer memory and human memory.” The second we begin to remember something, it immediately becomes faded or altered or distorted as time goes on and we retread our memories.

“Digital memory, in contrast, is absolutely perfect, a pristine copy of information,” he wrote. “[E]xcept when it fails, it fails catastrophically: Either the disk corrupts and you can’t read it, or somebody just decides to shut it down or erase it, as Yahoo! is doing to years and years of GeoCities stuff. Our society is increasingly relying on automatic storage of memories, which works really well 99 [percent] of the time, until it doesn’t.”

Jason Scott, whom I talked to by phone while he was at home in Waltham, Mass, was trying to make copies of as many GeoCities sites as he could before the shutdown, which then was still a couple of weeks away. He’d recruited several other people to start making copies as well, which was good, he said, especially if, “God forbid, we end up with two [copies] of something.”

Thompson relayed a similar sentiment in his e-mail. “It also reminds me of a point that Cory Doctorow once made,” he wrote. “If you really want a piece of information to live forever, you ideally want as many people as possible to make copies of it. Then there’s no single point of failure — no central digital brain that can collapse and take your memories along with it.”

Scott is the creator of textfiles.com, an archive site of bulletin board systems (which are sort of like forums) about which he made a documentary in 2005. He’s a vocal advocate for Internet archiving (“I never delete anything,” he said), and he worked with the Internet Archive (also called the “Wayback Machine,” at www.archive.org) and various other small-scale projects taking on the very large-scale project of preserving GeoCities sites. (Also, Yahoo!-rival Web-hosting sites like Jimdo launched GeoCities rescue missions: “Lifeboat for GeoCities.” And there’s also geocities-closing.com.)

But it’s difficult even to know how many sites were out there to be saved. Yahoo! won’t reveal the exact amount of server space GeoCities used.

“Yahoo! refuses to tell us,” Scott said. “They cite ‘privacy of the people,’ which is kind of like citing the privacy of the people in the house you’re burning down.”

What Scott and his team do know is that in 1999, Yahoo! bought a 10-terabyte disc array, which, “could mean anything,” Scott said. All that tells the archivists is that there may have been as many as 10 terabytes of sites to track down, or seven terabytes, or four. They don’t know.

The crew was searching Google for “terms that were big in ’95” to find the sites. They would Google “Netscape,” for instance. “Another one is Commodore, or Atari ... things that still had kind of a meaning” in the ’90s, Scott said. They were looking for “these crazy terms that are of that era.”

When they had first started to scan, the archivists were finding hundreds of sites, easily. But as the shutdown date approached, they were dredging the bottom of the Web, grabbing any remaining Homesteads hiding in obscure places, buried in esoteric search terms.

With about two weeks to go, Scoot said he was “lucky” if he was able to get a gig or two of new material.

“I’ve heard these arguments before: ‘Who cares, it’s GeoCities,’” said Scott, “which is totally understandable if you’re not looking at it from any sort of historical perspective whatsoever. It’s totally understandable if you don’t remember that time in that fashion, if you kind of stumbled into cable modems in 2004 and now you’re like, ‘Who cares, that stuff looks like garbage.’” Those people just aren’t getting the point, Scott says.

“Dozens and dozens of people are gonna find [these archives],” he says. “This is a very interesting, very vulnerable audience. I am completely sure I have lots of Web sites of people who died, and their Web site is still there.”

Erin Brown, a Web site producer living in Ft. Lauderdale, shares Scott’s reverence and Thompson’s appreciation for the era.

“What stands out to me were the mom-and-pops,” she said. “Now sites have a very corporate presence. The mom-and-pops were the best sites you could go to. They were pouring their energy and all of their knowledge into it, trying to be the definitive source on a subject. Nowadays, because it’s so easy to use computers and post online, you don’t need to have the skills that you needed in the past. [The mom-and-pops] were a much more organic thing. There wasn’t that question of ‘Do you trust everything on the Internet?’ There weren’t many voices, so you kind of did.”

Say that somehow Scott and his team were able to catch all of these mom-and-pops (maybe even a couple times over). Thompson pointed out the potential and unfortunate problem with archive or storage sites like the Wayback Machine is that even though these sites are storing data, it’s not so easy to find it. Google only puts its feelers in so deep.

“[U]nless I’m mistaken, Google doesn’t crawl the Wayback Machine, so eventually most of those GeoCties sites that once would have turned up on the far, far right end of society’s long-tail Google searching will wink out of existence, as far as the searchosphere is concerned,” Thompson wrote. “Those sites will only be surfed by people who a) go looking for information, b) find a link to a long-dead GeoCities site, and then c) are so motivated to read the long-dead site that they take the URL, plug it into the Wayback Machine, and go and retrieve an old copy.”

Scott is currently working on a documentary to put a “human and narrative” face on GeoCities sites. In the end, Scott predicted that, if they’re lucky, the archivists would be able to salvage about 40 percent of the sites created in the 15 years since GeoCities launched. He’s proud of that 40 percent, and his hope is that his documentary will deliver a strong message. “This is what we almost lost,” he said.

“It’s too bad,” wrote Thompson, “because many of those GeoCities sites were precisely the sort of ultra-weird personal-obsession sites that are, for me, one of the chief delights of the Internet.”

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