Dug up an old GeoCities page from 1998 last night

Found a fan site for some forgotten TV show. Had a guestbook, a MIDI file, and a "best viewed in Netscape" badge. Tried to send a message on the guestbook and it actually went through. That thing is still running on some server somewhere.

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kellymurphy2mo ago

Ours went down in 2008 when the hosting company finally pulled the plug. I had a friend who ran a Nsync fan page with a MIDI version of "Bye Bye Bye" that would auto play every single time you loaded it. We used to joke that it was the internet equivalent of Chinese water torture.

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elliots492mo ago

Oh man, that MIDI torture brings back memories. My own GeoCities page had a cheesey MIDI file that played on loop, drove my friends crazy. It was the wild west back then, you just threw everything on a page and hoped it loaded.

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anthony9892mo ago

Man, tell me about it! I actually read this article a while back about how those old MIDI files were like the ringtone equivalent of holding someone hostage at a party. You'd load a page and suddenly get blasted with some tinny version of a pop song that sounded like a dying robot. @kellymurphy, your friend's Nsync page sounds like digital warfare, I can almost hear the MIDI "Bye Bye Bye" drilling into my brain right now. People who didn't live through that era don't understand the sheer terror of accidentally clicking on a GeoCities shrine and getting hit with a looping MIDI file that freezes your browser for 10 minutes. It was basically the internet's way of saying "welcome to my page, you're not leaving until this song finishes, and it never finishes.

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