Artifact Details

Title

A Tale of Deleted Cities : A Conversation with GeoCities Co-founder David Bohnett

Catalog Number

102738191

Type

Moving image

Description

Before Facebook and Myspace, GeoCities housed the web’s largest online community. Started in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet, the site’s tens of millions of "homesteaders" created personal pages in theme-based neighborhoods of their choice. Those neighborhoods started out as webcams in real places in Los Angeles—one in the gay mecca of West Hollywood, another in Beverly Hills for high-end shopping. But when GeoCities invited users to add their own pages on those themes, a virtual land rush began. After a spectacular IPO, GeoCities was bought by Yahoo! in 1999 for over $3 billion.

Yahoo! eventually decided GeoCities was obsolete. All 38 million pages of the main English-language site were to be erased in October 2009 until hacker preservationists from The Internet Archive, Archive Team, and other volunteers stepped in. To showcase the tens of millions of pages they preserved, artist Richard Vijgen created an interactive visualization of the 650-gigabyte backup of GeoCities, titled "Deleted City," now on display at the Computer History Museum.

Date

2016-09-21

Participants

Bohnett, David, speaker
Hollar, John C., moderator
Vijgen, Richard, speaker

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, CA

Format

MOV

Series Title

CHM Live

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X7944.2017