Protoman’s goodbye to Geocities, a Transformers fan’s eulogy. RIP 1995-2009
Back in mid 1995, a small free web hosting page was introduced to the virgin internet. It was called Geocities and it offered us budding computer users 2MB of space to do whatever we please for the world to see, it would be the beginning of something huge for many and I was one of those lucky few to be a part of it.
So in early 1997, I started “Hot Rod’s Homepage” my first website. It was a shrine dedicated to (at the time), all and any aspect of Hot Rod and Rodimus Prime. Every story told, every toy, every merchendise, every image/fan art, heck even every kitbash I could find by fellow fans. Geocities gave me freedom to show my love for Transformers and this character. As time progressed into the early 2000s, they gave us an upgrade to 15mb of space to go wild. At the time, I had a digital camera and webcam and thus showed my budding collection and who was the man behind the Proto shades. Those were good times….
Alas, these times have come to an end but fear not, I will try my best in the future to put up my original webpage, unedited on my .com one day as a tribute to those innocent days.
Also www.archive.org and www.internetArchaeology.org have a good deal of past Geocities pages backed up, so if you still have the original URL of some of your favorites….. give it a shot.
Enjoy the video by the way.
Duration : 0:10:34
[youtube cEhAGKyGFIs]
love that g2 …
love that g2 superion on the shelf if u ever decide to sell it pm me
i so had like 3 …
i so had like 3 pages on it!!! i know… it sucks that they took it down. *pats ur back* it’s aight boo
shit Proto, that …
Proto, that was very emotional. I’ve never even USED geocities before, but am aware of the impact it had. Good job man.
RIP GeoCities! You …
RIP GeoCities! You were my first webhost and I will never forget my first. You taught me how to code in HTML and that FrontPage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. You gave me what seemed to be unlimited server space and unlimited transfer bandwidth, although I do recall a nasty email where you claimed I had exceeded my bandwidth limit. But I forgave you for that. Nevertheless, you never charged me a dime for all you did for me for all these years. I’m really going to miss you old friend.
I didn’t expect …
I didn’t expect many people to even know what Geocities is, when some of the “newfags” ask, I tell them…. think Facebook…… but no limits *then points to the sky*
Man you never see …
Man you never see web rings anymore….. or page counters or guestbooks……. sigh….
I remember in 2002- …
I remember in 2002-04 in my second year in Middle School and I made a Geocities webpage for Megazords and other robots as well as a secondary account for a card game I was really into at the time… I don’t even remember the urls or my usernames, but it was a fun little blast of fun.
Ah the nostalgia
…
Ah the nostalgia
Glad you made this video!
I first got online …
I first got online around the same time, maybe a year or two later, and Transformers was literally the first thing I searched for. Checking out all of the pages like the one you had, with pics and short wavs, shots of unreleased G2 toys, Japanese TFs, what the ever. It was so fascinating and really played a part in keeping my interest in the franchise burning. There was some web ring I had bookmarked, can’t really remember the name, but I spent countless hours pouring through the sites
Fuck you for making …
you for making me shed a tear over webspace! ;_;
I think only a narrow, narrow generation of people will be able to feel the weird sense of a loss of time from this.
RUST IN PEACE! I’ll …
RUST IN PEACE! I’ll miss you more, like the deserts miss the rain!
Imagine in like 10 …
Imagine in like 10 or 15 more years when Myspace tanks, lmfao. People are gonna be crying and emo’s are gonna die, or finally go outside.
funny i wasn’t …
funny i wasn’t expecting to see any tributes to geocities going down..was nice to see this though..think i’ll remember the page counter the most..
Yeah man…..I hate …
Yeah man…..I hate that Computers eventually Crash…. cause at one time I had over 30 TF related sights bookmarked and when I got a new computer I couldn’t even think of all of what I had saved…LOL but I definently remember yours…..it was uniques cause of your Hot Rod collection.
Hah DJ Soundwave? …
Hah DJ Soundwave? You use to go to it? That’s amazing to hear that atleast some people enjoyed it.
I had a Geocities …
Too bad I didn’t get to see Gary Chalk.
I had a Geocities site way back in the day too. Unfortunately, I updated it a few years ago so alot of the really old stuff is gone. Right now it is, soon to be was, mostly a collection list. It also had some links to other TF sites. Some of which have gone the way of the dodo, like Cosmic Rust, ironically. And also to my surprise there’s a review of my 1st convention, Transformerscon 2005.
It’s the end of an …
It’s the end of an era…
Man ,I loved Hot …
Man ,I loved Hot Rod’s Homepage….. I haven’t seen it in awhile……..
Man.
Nice Collection man .
Goodbye GeoCities. …
Goodbye GeoCities. I’ll miss you, FF7World2000 and DBZHaven2k. My first two websites with all the stolen fan images I could store on my CD-RW.