Today, Geocities was shut down.  Geocities was an institution.  Those of us who have been surfing the Internet for a long time remember it fondly.  If you wanted to publish a website, Geocities was where you went.  It was quick, it was easy, and did not require you to know much HTML or Javascripting.  Mind you, this was back in the day that HTML coding was done in Notepad or some other text editor.

While I never had a Geocities website (I have always published on my own domain, quite sporadically until about a year ago), I have surfed to probably hundreds, if not thousands of them.  I would jump from community to community, webring to webring.  These were the days before Wikipedia, or Flash.  The days of dialup…the early nineties…waiting for websites to appear…staying up until all hours of the night…the Internet was a collection of hobbyists…there was no commercialization, except for the porn sites…

We complain about the lack of speed now, but we were happy with 56k.  It was ok for a page to take 20 seconds to load.  Now our attention span has decreased that if that page takes more than 5 seconds to appear, we are gone.

Those were the days.