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Computers, Web, Social Networking
RIP GeoCities: 1994-2009
GeoCities (you know, that aging homepage hosting service that you only ever arrived at by accident) is getting ready to shut its doors. The pioneering service, which eventually sold out to Yahoo! and slowly slipped into complete irrelevance, became popular in the 90's during the early dot-com boom for allowing geeks to quickly and easily create their own basic Web sites.
Yahoo! very quietly announced the demise of the all-but-forgotten service via the GeoCities' help page. GeoCities has stopped signing up new customers (was there anyone actually still signing up for this service?) and, by the end of the year, will shut down entirely. At that point, users' pages will no longer be accessible online.
News of the closing has been greeted with a collective shrug, and a little ironic nostalgia, by the Interwebs. PC World summed it up pretty nicely with the headline: "So Long, GeoCities: We Forgot You Still Existed." For its part, BetaNews waxed nostalgic over GeoCities's less-than-professional appearance, accurately describing most of the pages on the service as "Eye-searing."
Happy 20th Birthday, Interwebz!
Al Gore may not agree, but this week marks the anniversary of the birth of the Web. 20 years ago, on March 13, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher for the European Organization for Nuclear Research lab outside of Geneva, Switzerland, proposed an idea to counter data-loss at CERN due to personnel turnover and incompatible computers. In the proposal, Berners-Lee described the predicament by stating, "When two years is a typical length of stay, information is constantly being lost... The technical details of past projects are sometimes lost forever, or only recovered after a detective investigation in an emergency. Often, the information has been recorded, it just cannot be found."To combat the information dilemma, Berners-Lee drafted his manifesto "Information Management: A Proposal." In his script, Berners-Lee suggested that we "should work toward a universal linked information system," and that "the aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterward." Using remarkable foresight, Berners-Lee's proposal would take a few years to take shape, as pioneers such as Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen of Netscape paved the way for casual surfing.
So even though Al Gore may have said "I took the initiative in creating the Internet," give Berners-Lee his due credit this weekend as you search for random videos of people doing ridiculous things. Oh, how proud he must be of how far his baby has come. [From: Cnet News]
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The 100 Oldest Internet Domains
If you're younger than 20, you might be surprised to learn that many Web site addresses are older than you are (actually, at that age, you probably think the Web has been around forever). But for those of us who can remember the days before the World Wide Web existed, the revelation is a shocker. Many of us still think the World Wide Web, as a late-'90s phenomenon, but the Internet's domains (the part that comes after the "www." on, say, a Web address) actually date back much further.
We can thank this bit of information to Life & Times blog, which has compiled a list of the 100 oldest domains on the Internet. The oldest domain on the Internet is Symbolics, a computer manufacturer that registered Symbolics.com on March 15 of 1985. Defense contractor Northrop secured Northrop.com in November of the same year, with Xerox grabbing Xerox.com in January of 1986. Just six domains were registered in 85, but a comparatively huge 55 were registered in 86. The rest, of course, is history.
Reading through the list of aged domains is enough to make a grizzled old IT guy misty-eyed at names like DEC.com and Tandy.com, which are sites for companies that no longer exist. But the real shocker is how many of today's biggest tech names don't appear on the list. Microsoft, for example, didn't register its domain until 1991. Computer maker Dell -- originally known as PCs Unlimited -- didn't become "Dell" until 1988, so it's not on the list. And, of course, modern search power-houses like Yahoo! and Google didn't come into being until the mid- and late-'90s, respectively.
Meanwhile, Apple.com doesn't appear until the number 64 spot (February of 1987). Interestingly, 1987 is the same year that year Apple produced a video on what it thought computing in 2010 would be like. While the shape and design is obviously different, and you don't see too many talking bow-tied and schedule-minded avatars, the company's vision wasn't too far off on what we can do with our computers today.
One thing Apple didn't realize or predict in this video, however, is just how valuable Apple.com would eventually become.
From Life & Times
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We can thank this bit of information to Life & Times blog, which has compiled a list of the 100 oldest domains on the Internet. The oldest domain on the Internet is Symbolics, a computer manufacturer that registered Symbolics.com on March 15 of 1985. Defense contractor Northrop secured Northrop.com in November of the same year, with Xerox grabbing Xerox.com in January of 1986. Just six domains were registered in 85, but a comparatively huge 55 were registered in 86. The rest, of course, is history.
Reading through the list of aged domains is enough to make a grizzled old IT guy misty-eyed at names like DEC.com and Tandy.com, which are sites for companies that no longer exist. But the real shocker is how many of today's biggest tech names don't appear on the list. Microsoft, for example, didn't register its domain until 1991. Computer maker Dell -- originally known as PCs Unlimited -- didn't become "Dell" until 1988, so it's not on the list. And, of course, modern search power-houses like Yahoo! and Google didn't come into being until the mid- and late-'90s, respectively.
Meanwhile, Apple.com doesn't appear until the number 64 spot (February of 1987). Interestingly, 1987 is the same year that year Apple produced a video on what it thought computing in 2010 would be like. While the shape and design is obviously different, and you don't see too many talking bow-tied and schedule-minded avatars, the company's vision wasn't too far off on what we can do with our computers today.
One thing Apple didn't realize or predict in this video, however, is just how valuable Apple.com would eventually become.
From Life & Times
Related Links:
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