One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age

As mentioned in Happy 2009!, because of an error during archiving, around 50,000 pages lost their real “last updated” information and were marked with the date of their archival. So we decided to change their status from “last modified” to “archived on”.

before:

after:

If you’ve been following One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op for some time — or maybe even already for more than 12 years! — you may notice that this is actually the least important change. The content and flow have changed dramatically. It is no longer chronological. A page that is clearly from 1996 can appear after one from 2000, followed by a genuine April 2009 site, and then something from 2005… Sometimes you can tell it from the content or style, or simply because the webmaster put the last updated date on the page.

It’s quite a roller coaster: Backstreet Boys fandom (2001) next to Frames No Frames (1997) next to Goodbye GeoCities! (2009).

And it’s not only about chronology. The stream has become somewhat curated. You can see how someone (or something) is moving through a particular neighborhood, following links, or grabbing pages from a specific web ring. Before, it never happened that several pages about dogs, cats, Star Wars, or dollz would appear in a row. Now it’s quite common. There can be multiple Titanic pages in a row, or a series of car-related sites. Right now, there are many screenshots about golf, all from the Augusta neighborhood. I think this gives a one-sided, unrealistic picture of GeoCities. But maybe I’m just used to a different dynamic: completely unrelated pages appearing one after another, the only thing they had in common being the time they were last modified. Before the error, topics would sometimes reappear for days or weeks too, but it was usually because something significant was happening in the world: the death of Princess Diana, Yahoo! introducing new TOS, September 11, a new X-Files season, Christmas, Yahoo! announcing the closure…

On the bright side, it’s a real pleasure to see so many older pages again!

Another new issue is the flood of screenshots of pages that don’t have an index.html, so we only see the file names in the directory. It can be interesting and even educational at times, but I’m afraid this is not what our followers would want to see for too long. We’re considering removing those pages from the timeline.

It’s February 27, 2025 IRL and January 1, 2009 in One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age timeline. The last year of GeoCities has started. The closure announcement will come on April 23, 2009.

Those who follow the project know that we have 381 934 websites in the archive. To the moment we posted screenshots of 279 310 of them. 102 000 left. One can ask how it can be that more than a quarter of the archived pages was last updated in the last 10 months of the Geocities existence?

I first found this oddity six years ago, while collecting materials for the post about the 10th anniversary of the closure announcement “Sorry to see you go”. My first thought was that the reason was that after the announcement many rushed to their pages to make the last changes or to leave a farewell note. It did happen, but not on such a scale.

A closer examination showed that there are ~ 50 000 pages that were updated in 10 days (in between April 25 and May 5, 2009) and that in these cases “last updated” date was just wrong. the mistake happened while grabbing the files from the server in 2009. The websites are from all the possible years, according to their content and the style.

So, if you were following our Tumblr for years and made the slow travel from 1995 to 2009, get ready for a new achronological adventure. But in the meantime:

Happy New 2009 !

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Bruce’s Home Page. Part I. “Malaysia’s Bill Gates”
Bruce’s Home Page. Part II. Calvin and Hobbes

Bruce’s home page was the first screenshot published on the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op tumblr blog. Of course that doesn’t mean this is the first page ever made on GeoCities, or even the oldest one in the archive. There are 3 dimensions of time at work here:

1. The inception date, when a user first claimed an address on GeoCities and filled out a template or published some files. The best approximation for this time is the earliest last-modified date found on a file in a user’s directory.
2. The last modified, when a user stopped updating their GeoCities project. The most effective approximation for this is the last-modified date of the home page, since most users would announce any change to sub pages on their home page. That’s also why these were selected to be screenshotted and made public.
3. The posting date, when the screenshot of a home page is appearing on tumblr. Only home pages are posted, in chronological order, according to their abandonment date.

The later a page’s last modified date, the longer the difference to the inception date can potentially be, and the more research is required to understand if content and design of a particular page are tied to the page’s last-modified date or if the page is even older. (More on the complexities of interpreting the last-modified date will be addressed in the upcoming essay “Generation Update”.)

In relation to Bruce’s page this means that there are other pages which were claimed earlier and hence are older, but since they have been updated by their users for longer and where abandoned later, they will also appear much later on the tumblr blog. As I am writing this, pages abandoned in March 2006 appear on tumblr, yet they might have been established many years before.

Let’s forget for a moment the metadata that’s available, and rely only on researchers’ eyes and ears. How can we guess a website’s age? How could we guess Bruce’s Home Page age?

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Bruce’s Home Page. Part I. “Malaysia’s Bill Gates”

In the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive, every GeoCities page and file is associated with meta data. A small portion is technical (there is not so much that can be said about a singular file apart from its URL, last modified date, and the links it contains), the most interesting and important information are the tags assigned by humans.

The chronologically first page in the archive, Bruce’s Home Page, was tagged with “calvin”, “welcome”, “give me time”, “template”, “portal”, and “interview”. These tags were not assigned at once, but added gradually. Only after seeing other pages it became clear to me that the page was made using a template, and only later research revealed that there could the be possibility for an interview with the person who made it. Well, it’s still a prospect. More on that in Part I of this series on Bruce’s Home Page.

“Give me time” is my tag for pages that are freshly born, or rather conceived and immediately abandoned, but their author leaves a promise to finish the page very soon, when school starts or ends, when summer starts or is over, or as in Bruce’s case “after my exams”.

The tag “calvin” was the first one I gave to this page, assuming that the graphic on the top means that the person was a fan of the comic strip series Calvin and Hobbes, and the future page was ment to be about it in the future. There are a lot of pages I misinterpreted like that.

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Ten years ago, on the 7th of February 2013 at 11:07 CET, the very first screenshot of a rescued and restored GeoCities home page was published on the Tumblr blog One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op.

Bruce’s Home Page was a fortunate exemplar to open the project with. Although it doesn’t have a lot of content and doesn’t look particularly spectacular, it offers a good deal of graphic and structural elements and verbal expressions to start a conversation about the web of the mid 1990’s and introduce the material we at the GeoCities Research Institute have at hand. The page can be discussed as an early web page, as a web page on GeoСities, and as an artifact of the archive. One could write a book about it, but let it be a series of 3 blog posts. And since it is a 10 years anniversary I’ll start with a little sensation.

“Bruce’s Home Page” or, by its semantic title, “topgun’s Home Page”, as visible in the browsers title bar on the top left, is a simple page. There is not much more to it than what is visible on the the screenshot. If you compare it with the actual page you’re only missing a footer containing an email link, a link back to the Hollywood neighborhood, a broken  Beverly Hills Internet icon (this  is how the company that started GeoCities web hosting service was originally called), a second under construction ribbon, and a copyright note “© 1995”.

The only thing we get to know about the author is that he calls himself Bruce and that he is “a Malaysian who is thrilled of having a website”. We assume he is a young Top Gun and Calvin and Hobbes fan. (More on the Calvin and Hobbes mystery will be discussed in part II.) He also seems to know something about computers, at least this is how I interpret the “I hate Bill Gates” label of the link he pointed to microsoft.com
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