“[W]ebsites and hosting services should not be ‘fads’ any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely. There’s history here. Real, honest, true history.” And thus did the Archive Team set out to save the entirety of Geocities.
The team, which has been working for past year on downloading old Geocities Web sites, is in the process of putting together a torrent that will contain the entire Geocities archive. Well, “entire.” The team tried its best to save what it could, but Yahoo, which bought Geocities in 1999, certainly didn’t make it easy on the team. Pre-Yahoo Web sites were particularly difficult to track down.
The torrent will be huge, estimated to come in around 900GB.
But considering how cheap hard drives are, I’d be shocked if more than a few Internet history buffs don’t download the entire archive.
What should happen is that someone upload the archive to Usenet. Can’t get any more rock-solid than that. It’s probably a little more stable than a public torrent, too.
Above, of course, is how CrunchGear would look if it were created by a teen, possibly me, in the Geocities era.