My first “personal home page” (today we call them websites) was started in 1995 thanks to a site called GeoPages. They gave anyone who wanted one a tiny bit of space on their public web server. (I seem to recall it was about 512K of storage.)
GeoPages was later changed to GeoCities. My site, “Al’s Place”, stayed there for a few years before I got annoyed with the ads and needed much more space, requiring me to move to a different hosting provider.
But I digress.
Thanks to the Wayback Machine over at the Internet Archives, you can now see the earliest copy of my website they have indexed. It was archived on February 3, 1999. The content itself looks like it was last updated in 1997 since there is a note on the site explaining that I’d moved on to a different hosting location.
Take a look at how the web began…
https://web.archive.org/web/19990202065140/http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/1842/
I am excited to find this snapshot, though sadly it doesn’t have any of the earlier versions. It’s at least a look at my site in its final form at the old GeoCities location. I had looked for this in the archives a few years ago and it wasn’t there, so I was surprised to find it.
Of special interest to me was my link to the “Banks Family Vacation” web page that inspired me to get a digital camera and start taking and sharing digital photos back in 1996.
Although the link on my archived site doesn’t work, it at least gave me what I needed to track it down in the Wayback Machine. Ladies and gentlemen, here may be the very first “take and post pictures from Disney” site that ever existed on the Internet:
https://web.archive.org/web/19990117025019/http://www.neosoft.com/sbanks/vacation/vacation.html
That capture was from January 1999.
In an upcoming article, I’ll share some more details on what was going on back then.
Until next time…