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Just changed my mind about auto-playing MIDI music on 90s sites after reading a Geocities archive
I used to think background MIDI files were the worst part of old web design, just annoying noise that made you scramble for the mute button. Then a buddy sent me a link to a Geocities fan page archive from 1997 for a band called The Muffs, and it had this little embedded MIDI of "Kids in America" that played on loop. I read a comment from the site's creator in an old guestbook where she said she picked that song because her dial-up connection took 45 seconds to load the page, so the music gave people something to listen to while they waited. That never crossed my mind, because I grew up on fast cable and just saw MIDI as clutter. Now I'm digging through archive.org looking at old Angelfire and Tripod pages from 1996 to 1999, and half of them have song notes in the HTML comments explaining why they chose that track. Has anyone else found a 90s site where the MIDI actually felt like part of the experience instead of just a headache?
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