I finally dug up my old Geocities site from 1998 and it's painful

Pulled the hard drive out of my parents' attic last weekend. Booted up a VM with IE6 just to see the old monster. It had a guestbook that still worked somehow, a midi of that one song from Titanic, and I called myself "WebMasterX" with a capital W and M. The background was that starry space pattern that repeated. Honestly I dont know how anyone found anything on the early web with all that blinking text. Did anyone else's old site have a "under construction" gif that never got replaced?

2 comments

2 Comments

claire9921mo ago

The "under construction" gif was basically a requirement back then. Mine had a little yellow guy with a shovel that I found on some free clip art site. I think half the web was just people putting those up and then forgetting about the site entirely. That starry space background was everywhere too, it was basically the default option when you didn't know what else to use. The whole thing was a mess of mismatched colors and fonts that no one cared about because the internet was still new and exciting. Blinking text was the worst, especially when people stacked three or four different blink effects on top of each other.

brooke5331mo ago

I read somewhere that those starry space backgrounds were actually a Windows 95 default or something, which explains why every kid with a computer had one. And yeah the blinking text gave me a headache back then, I remember trying to read a friend's site and just giving up.