In 1995, a small web hosting company based in Southern California called Beverly Hills Internet,

which had only opened up for business the year before, came up with a marketing idea,

intended to bring in new users.

They decided to give away website homepages to anyone who wanted one,

with each user getting 15 megabytes of space, which is almost nothing now, but was a huge

amount of space back in the 90s. And they organized these pages based on a made-up geography.

When new users signed up to get their free webpage, they'd be shown a list of different

neighborhoods they could join,

which included options like Beverly Hills for shopping and fashion, Bourbon Street for jazz and

Cajun food, Eureka, for small businesses, and Area 51 for science fiction and fantasy pages.

This collection of neighborhood divided free pages were based at geocities.com,

and the benefits users were given expanded over time,

from additional neighborhood options to drag-and-drop website building tools,

to chat rooms, comment sections, bulletin boards, and visitor count trackers, little visible

tallies that increased by one every time somebody visited the page. Geo-cities became immensely popular

for a variety of reasons, but core among them is that it made building a website super accessible, especially compared to the other

options available at the time. My first web page was a Geocities page, and most other people I know

who were at all involved with the early commercial era of the internet probably had their own

GeoCities page at some point as well.

And the tools they made available alongside that free chunk of server space allowed those of us

who were not tech world professionals to catch a glimpse of what the web might become

someday, a place where you could write and post things and actually maybe have them be seen by someone,

...