
The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness) - aditya
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2720
======
mhansen
For those that missed it, here's jacquesm's epic story of backing up
geocities. <http://reocities.com/newhome/makingof.html>

and the discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903567>

Does this torrent contain the fruits of the collaboration planed in that
discussion?

------
rwhitman
I like the concept of "Digital Heritage" as they call it.

I think preserving digital heritage may become an important issue in the next
few years. As the world begins to recognize the historic legacy of the web, it
may someday become as important as preserving physical historical landmarks.

Its time to accept that the internet may be the greatest legacy 21st century
civilization leaves behind. It likely isn't going anywhere, and is the most
complete archive of our lives, that may live on for generations after we're
dead.

For all we know, the things we type here could be preserved longer than the
pyramids of giza should someone make sure to back it up regularly. I hope that
someone does.

~~~
stevenbedrick
Charles Stross has an excellent novel, "Glasshouse", a major plot point of
which is that due to shoddy digital preservation practices, far-future
historians know virtually nothing about ≈1950 through ≈2050 or so. What little
they know is pieced together from fragmentary bits and pieces of evidence,
with results that are at turns hilarious and horrifying when "put into
practice" by historical re-enactors. Kind of reminded me of David Macauly's
"Motel of the Mysteries" in some ways.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I'll second the positive review of "Glasshouse." The lack of knowledge
portrayed in the book is also an interesting commentary on one of the often
unsung evils of DRM. That license server certainly won't be running 300 years
from now.

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jbail
Wow. This site is amazing. Tons of gems:
<http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/>

~~~
naz
Was under construction the first web meme? All these people couldn't have
arrived at the same metaphor individually (as obvious as it is).

~~~
britta
Check out [http://www.metafilter.com/85695/Please-Be-Patient-This-
Page-...](http://www.metafilter.com/85695/Please-Be-Patient-This-Page-is-
Under-Construction#2774563) for a person's story of how he made the first
animated GIFs.

~~~
pronoiac
Heh. I'd say that comment made it to Hacker News last year, but I already
linked it in the Mefi thread! And then I got server push animation working on
my server, & yes, it's really as hideous as people say.

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cnlwsu
Sounds like a good candidate for an Amazon public data set
(<http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/>). Although they do peak at 1 TB.

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liedra
I'm actually sad that I didn't put my first website on geocities now! I had my
own web hosting from my ISP, so I had a fabulously easy to remember url of
"homepages.tig.com.au/~liedra" which was lost as soon as my family upgraded to
a cable connection from dialup. And no, archive.org didn't manage to catch it
:( I think it had a page devoted to Nick Cave and some terrible poetry! Go go
websites of a 17 year old! :)

The interesting thing was that at the time my friends and I (who had ISP-based
homepages) looked down on Geocities because it was "lame" comparatively. Now
I'm sad that I don't have any records of that original page (possibly on an
ancient CD-R though? but most of those early ones have degraded now...)

~~~
kingofspain
My first pages were on my ISP which offered a _subdomain!_ I paid £2 a month
extra (on top of call charges) for the privelige. My friends thought I was
crazy but I showed them when that very same subdomain impressed someone enough
to give me a web dev job ("You have a subdomain? Impressive").

I also looked down on geocities/angelfire sites and I still think I got the
better deal out of it - my first stuff was too embarrassing to live on for
eternity in the depths of a torrent.

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scrame
This is fantastic.

The early web is a treasure trove of an interesting time in history. It was
the first time average people could just write public documents to express
themselves.

Naturally the pages were terrible, covered in things that look good the first
time you see it, pointless opinions and personal shrines to obscure relics of
pop-culture.

The web is still the same, but more everyday. Companies work day and night to
have a web presence, and "using the internet" is synonymous with replying to
status and 'liking' things.

Geocities, AOL Homepages, and tripod are landmarks of the first time in
history someone could just make a page about themselves, or something they
liked and _anyone_ could see it. It was society making paintings on caves.

Unfortunately, these sites don't produce revenue, and never will, so from a
corporate point of view, they are worthless.

The early era of the web is like trying to find rare music. Of course there is
a modern site, a torrent, or some convenient way to find most of what you
want. What you find is at best, the same thing everyone else finds. The old
web is full of non-technical people earnestly trying to make something, not a
startup, not to sell a book, just trying to put something together which is
largely lost in the ease of "List your favorite bands"

Not that it was better, or more insightful, simply that it is a huge body of
primitive work that is unlikely to be recreated. These things should be
stored, if for no other reason than we can see the bloviated opinions of
mensans, the C-style poetry of 90's sysadmins, or just the insane ramblings of
people who think like Gene Ray, but don't have the perseverence to keep up
timecube.

The sites are a labor of love, no matter the revenue, and it annoys me to no
end that AOL or Yahoo has the power to simply delete these old sites because
they don't make business sense, to businesses that don't even know what they
are doing.

Anyway, as someone who mirrored a few old HomePages and Geocities sites, and
backs up pieces of the old internet whenever I can find them, this is a breath
of fresh air.

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textfiles
Hey, everyone, Jason Scott (the textfiles.com guy) here.

Just wanted to address that reocities.com has even more than I do, and more
than what's in the torrent. If you want to browse geocities, like ye old days,
go visit reocities. This data release is never meant to be "all of geocities"
just "a lot of geocities" (and all I have).

I am ALL for a 2.0 from jacquesm. :)

------
mhd
How many "web rings" fit into 1 TB?

~~~
roadnottaken
Wow, when did those disappear? That phrase immediately brought me back to
~1994. :)

~~~
mhd
Disappear? webring.com is still there. I dare you to enter "goth poetry" in
its search window. Double dare, as a matter of fact.

~~~
_exec

           Skeletal Lovers
       Two dead people
       Embraced even in death
       They lie there for eternity
       Together forever
       Memories turned to dust
       Laughter and sin forgotten
       Nothing but pale white bone
       Nothing to complain about
       Only the two of them
       Forever together
    

...

------
Jach
Sounds like a great excuse to test those "Unlimited Diskspace!" and "Unlimited
Bandwidth!" claims of shared providers.

~~~
vaksel
they don't work, the second you start getting any serious traffic you get a
warning. I had a video(flash movie) that got popular, and they sent me a
warning after only 2 gigs of bandwidth.

Granted those 2 gigs were used up in something like 5 minutes, but never the
less..you'd think they'd give you a little more to play with.

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rakkhi
I remember creating my first site on geocities. A southpark fan site with
links to download episodes (linked to another site hosting the of course).
That obviously became the most popular feature. Think will have to get the
torrent or at least part of it for a trip down memory lane. It is the digital
equvilent of the 80's haircut

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pavel_lishin
I'd love to be able to search those contents. I'm pretty sure I had a few
Geocities sites, but I'm not going to download a terabyte to see if it's in
there.

~~~
corin_
I imagine at least somebody will download to a server and host them all there.
Might grab a new 1TB drive into one of my servers and do it if I'm bored
enough...

~~~
jacquesm
I've been doing that for the last 12 months, and the collection is
significantly larger than that.

<http://www.reocities.com/>

~~~
arst
While I think the web is probably a better place with reocities than without
it, slapping ads on this content feels a tad bit slimy to me. I'm curious to
hear your take on the ethical and legal implications of it.

~~~
jacquesm
The ads are actually a boost for a HN'er.

And let's suppose for a second that they were not (as they have not been in
the past), reocities has cost a fairly large amount of money to date (instead
of made money, as you suggest), not a single person that has asked me to
remove the content has ever commented on the presence of the ads, and neither
has anybody that has found their stuff again because I backed it up.

On the contrary, the reactions have been almost 100% positive with a very few
exceptions.

~~~
arst
_(instead of made money, as you suggest)_

I apologize if that's how you read my post; I certainly didn't intend to
suggest that or to belittle the amount of work and money that you've put into
this project.

~~~
jacquesm
If you put up half of the money that went in to it sight unseen then we'll
call it even , deal ? ;)

------
wenbert
I remember starting out in Geocities and then in Angelfire. Those where the
days when you had to submit your site to the Yahoo directories :D I actually
made money selling ads from Commission Junction back then. It wasn't much but
it felt great.

------
micheljansen
Yay for the preservation of a generation. My early attempts of hacking
together something in Notepad as a kid should be in there somewhere.

Now if only Yahoo donated the geocities.com domain to whoever has the guts to
keep this archive online...

------
mrschwabe
YEAH my first website lives on!

------
jbillingsley
I can't for the life of me remember what I put out on geocities but it was
probably something to do with Star Wars. I think my username back then was
Fett82. Good times...

------
Dramatize
For anyone in Australia, it would be cheaper to pay them to put the data on a
HDD, wrap it in bacon and hand deliver it - rather than download the torrent.

~~~
noonespecial
Really? I'm _seeding_ it from Adelaide. There are options besides whatever
Telstra shovels your way in most areas, you just have to poke around.

How would you like your bacon cooked?

~~~
Dramatize
I like it crispy.

------
steve19
This may be the largest public torrent ever created!

------
sz
Did Alex Stefanov's collection of free online math resources make it in? It
was an awesomely comprehensive list.

------
TamDenholm
1TB of internet nostalgia.

~~~
Luyt
Argh, they're gonna revive and store the stuff I was so ashamed for that I
hoped it would never resurface.

~~~
tiles
On reocities.com you can request to have information removed.

If you want sites removed from this torrent... better ask now, before the
torrent's up.

