The Great Archival of '09
In 2009, Yahoo! shut Geocities down in America, cue outrage from the masses. Fortunately for netizens everywhere, multiple organizations sought to do the same exact thing in archiving every available Geocities webpage. Parallel to this, multiple groups have established archives to Websites outside of Geocities, and furthermore, the internet outside of the web. The following information will consist of five Geocities related pages, including one entirely related to gifs, three Web archival operations, alongside one browser emulator, and two websites which host archived Bulletin Board System (BBS) and Usenet conversations, respectively.
Geocities
OoCities.org, which archived many geocities cites upon the announcement of Yahoo shutting down GeoCities in 2009. On the bottom of this site’s homepage, they cover the rise and fall of geocities, bringing up how greatly Geocities was likely to have been affected by the y2k craze, as around 2.3 of all websites talked about ‘2000’ in some way. This archive is much more rudimentary than the others listed. It doesn’t provide a way to generally search for content, you either must know exactly what you’re looking for, or be willing to endlessly browse.
The Geocities Gallery lists archived GeoCities by ‘neighborhood’, the specific area of interest the site is meant to cover. Places like ‘Area 51’ cover topics of oddity while ‘Hollywood’ was more for entertainment. As this archive shows, though, people often just did their own thing, posting up personal albums alongside their site content. There was no judgment. Furthermore, the thumbnails on this site exemplify well the limitations of archival, as so many images are gone because they linked to some other part of the web, rather than being downloaded on their own site.
One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age is another archive for GeoCities, one which provides commentary on notable sites. One neat feature is that they have a list of their captures ordered by the date they were last updated. On their front page, they cover internet topics such as linkware and the perpetual calendar.
Ge.ocities.org is another archive of geocities. Hopefully, it’s making itself clear just how much people loved Geocities back in the day. So many efforts were made to capture each and every website before they were gone forever, and the products of those attempts were often messy and only made sense to the people who were looking for their own webpages.
“Cameron's World is a web-collage of text and images excavated from the buried neighbourhoods of archived GeoCities pages (1994–2009).”
The whole site is jam-packed with gifs, with some interactive elements present. Oddly enough, near a block of text saying “IF YOU STUDY THE MATERIAL ON THIS WEBSITE YOU WILL HOPEFULLY UNDERSTAND WHAT OUR PURPOSE HERE ON EARTH HAS BEEN.”, One can find a question mark, linking to a capture of the Heaven’s Gate Geocities webpage, a notable suicide cult.
The Web
Possibly the most popular site on this page, the Wayback Machine touts having archived “more than 799 billion web pages”. Two notable limitations with Wayback Machine are that 1) the Wayback Machine was getting set up over 1995, so there obviously aren’t any captures before then, and 2) what gets recorded is entirely dependent on whether somebody chooses for it to be. In most sites on the Wayback Machine, you might notice that captures are incomplete and inconsistent until about the latter half of 2004. Take for instance jmu.edu’s capture history, it looks really shoddy until about that same point in time. Oldweb.today uses the Wayback Machine to emulate what viewing the Web would’ve looked like in the past. One thing is it’s a bit cumbersome to have to enter in the exact capture you want to view each time you use the site.
The Library of Congress has a few older websites, mainly .gov sites and the pages of congress members. Kind of boring, but, hey, it exists.
Extra Goodies
It’s important to note that multiple sites on the Web are dedicated to recording the internet outside of Websites. For example, both textfiles.com andusenet archives have boatloads of old internet records, pertaining to BBS .txt files and Usenet conversions respectively. There was an aspect of community on the internet before the prevalence of websites, but expression was bare bones due to the limitations of ASCII. If you’re interested, though, there is a list from Telnet on still-active BBSes. HowToGeek provides a good guide on how to get on them today.