[HN Gopher] A one-person oral history of Geocities HTML Chat (2022)
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A one-person oral history of Geocities HTML Chat (2022)
Author : kickofline
Score : 100 points
Date : 2023-06-26 21:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (cohost.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cohost.org)
| atemerev wrote:
| I was there! I dialed up my connection, and went straight to
| http://timessquarechat.geocities.com (later
| gameschat.geocities.com), my fingers still remember. I was a 15
| years old kid in the city of Omsk, Siberia; and nearly everyone
| else was from the US. I was talking to strangers with my broken
| English, and everyone was real, someone with a story. Fun times!
| lkbm wrote:
| Another memory: when joining a chat, the standard form just said
| "username enters the chat" or something along those lines, but it
| was just an HTML form, and the entry text was just a hidden
| input.You could write your own form that would give a different
| entry message. A few Geocities sites had a dropdown to select
| from a few options. I believe I had (probably copied from
| somewhere else) a form that had both dropdowns and an option to
| choose a freeform input for your entry text.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| What a delightful article to read. The early days of the web and
| internet were indeed wild.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| If I recall well, geocities html chat and the java applet (which
| was indeed a cots,used as well on chatmefree and the like) were
| existing at the same time (or maybe only on chatmefree? Memory is
| fuzzy),these communities were great and I really loved them. It
| might also be the cause of different fuck up in my life but it's
| another matter.
|
| When yahoo killed these chat rooms,it was really the end of an
| era and I actually turned to MMORPG...Le sight.
| mooxie wrote:
| I feel very fortunate to have been around for this part of
| internet culture. Chat was so different at the time; this part
| especially stuck out to me:
|
| >Our MC Skat Kat posted from the persona of this fictional MC
| Skat Kat, regularly referring to Paula Abdul as his girlfriend.
| Everyone simply accepted this.
|
| You would see the same essentially-anonymous users every day, and
| there were users with known-unlikely stories - this is before
| catfishing as a concept was part of the lexicon - but they were
| just accepted. Did I think that I was talking, at 13, to Demi
| Moore about Bruce Willis's latest movie? No, I did not. But
| someone got online every night to just shoot the shit and pretend
| to be Demi Moore, and they were just one of the gang. No one
| believed them but no one tried to prove them wrong, either,
| because they were otherwise a good citizen. It was surreal, but
| at the time human interaction in real-time over the internet with
| strangers WAS surreal, in itself. No one could prove or disprove
| anything without a lot of work, so people just tended to shrug at
| wild claims.
|
| I know that newer generations are all experiencing their own
| forms of social-media-ingrouping that they will feel just as
| nostalgic for, but it truly was a unique time.
| mlyle wrote:
| > I know that newer generations are all experiencing their own
| forms of social-media-ingrouping that they will feel just as
| nostalgic for, but it truly was a unique time.
|
| BBSes, MUDs/MOOs, Usenet, things like this, and even EFNet had
| things that don't really exist in the same way very often
| anymore (not every one had each of these things, but..):
|
| - A broad optimism about technology and communication using
| technology
|
| - Reasonably small communities. Even during EFNet's
| simultaneous 100k peak (of which many were bots), there were
| probably 30k truly active users and a few thousand people
| feeling deep ownership of the network and community. It was
| more like a medium sized town. (And now it's like that town
| after most people have moved away).
|
| - A shared culture (coming from the smallness of the
| communities).
|
| - A broad focus. Subreddits are small; discords are small; etc.
| But in these other places you'd run into and talk to the same
| people about many different kinds of things. You might have a
| discord group of a few dozen friends, but it's not likely to be
| a semi-exclusive social channel for you for many topics.
|
| - Local ties. Especially with the BBS.
|
| - Blurry lines on anonymity. Purely anonymous, distant
| connections morphed to real life ones far more often than
| today.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| I remember when my local BBS started letting you type emails.
| You would write your email, type the address to send to, then
| everyone's emails were sent out in one batch in the middle of
| the night. At the time, I was absolutely amazed. That and
| logging in to play Legend of the Red Dragon in full ASCII
| color!
| giantrobot wrote:
| > A broad optimism about technology and communication using
| technology
|
| A big part of this in my mind was the novelty of it. It was
| actually a whole new capability for people.
|
| In 1977 if you loved Star Wars maybe you could talk to your
| friends about it. If you didn't know anyone that felt the
| same about it you were kind of stuck. If you were lucky you
| might have a sci-fi convention nearby you could attend.
| Magazines might give you some interesting details but it
| wasn't a conversation.
|
| This was the same in 1987 for _most_ people. Unless you had a
| 1) computer 2) modem 3) BBS client 4) a local BBS that was
| affordable to call that let you talk Star Wars 5) the
| knowledge to do all that you were stuck with few options to
| talk Star Wars.
|
| By 1997 the average Star Wars lover had a lot more good
| options for talking Star Wars. You no longer had to hope a
| local BBS had good Star Wars options. The Internet gave
| everybody on it global reach. Your homepage could declare
| your love/hate of all things Star Wars. You could get e-mail
| or guestbook responses to stuff you wrote.
|
| If you were just getting into Star Wars in 2007 there had
| been at least a decade of existing discussion and web pages
| about Star Wars. It was just assumed people on the Internet
| were talking about Star Wars and you could jump into any of
| those discussions. The same was true in 2017.
|
| The 1997 time frame was really the first time that idea was
| true. It was _enpowering_ to just be able to write stuff
| about a subject and publish it in a globally accessible way.
| Normal people never really had that ability before. It was
| also very much "on the Internet no one knows you're a dog".
| A 15 year old's fan page about something existed alongside a
| 30 year old professional writer's fan page.
| mlyle wrote:
| Sure-- I agree with all that. And I mean, I've benefitted
| from the new thing: being parts of groups of 50 people
| assembled worldwide hacking on one thing because it's
| interesting or whatever where you'd never have a critical
| mass on a local board.
|
| But there was something about having consistent groups of
| friends online. It stayed around on the internet for awhile
| after mass adoption, but really started to dry up around
| 2002, and then the rise of social media hastened the
| demise.
| milsorgen wrote:
| This is interesting. Reminds me of how every now and then I try
| and find information on old chats I remember, particularly those
| that used software called iChat. Yahoo! Chat used it for a time
| as did the Metallica.com chatroom, it was some sort of browser
| plugin and for a brief moment in time it was the best thing on
| the Internet. I met people from all over the world through that
| software and I always found it odd that information was so scant
| on it.
| Nezteb wrote:
| Speaking of Geocities, there is a modern reincarnation called
| Neocities: https://neocities.org
| rvense wrote:
| I used to frequent a chat room like this, around 1998-9. I think
| it was absolutechat.com. I think they restricted the HTML
| somewhat, though, I remember there being a group of people who
| tried to ruin it and some of us figured out a snippet of HTML
| that'd just close a bunch of tags to clean up. Fun times.
| petesergeant wrote:
| This has reminded me on the amount of time I used to spend on the
| very early HTML forums, especially Red Alert / C&C-themed ones.
| The same frames-based layout. I remember Geocities much more
| fondly than the OP, but also hypermart, which was one of the
| first free web hosts to allow CGI hosting.
| paultopia wrote:
| The implementation detail with the infinite document size is
| surprising! I remember the HTML chatrooms from that era on other
| sites, and IIRC a lot of them worked via a meta tag that just
| told the browser to refresh the page every so often.
|
| I still have friends whom I met in chatrooms from around 1996ish
| using that technique.
| nness wrote:
| * * *
| bluedemon wrote:
| FTA: "Geocities was a formative website for the older
| millennials"
|
| Well, they got that part wrong.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Why?
| bluedemon wrote:
| It wasn't just older Millenials.
| lkbm wrote:
| There was definitely a solid period _much_ longer than a day
| where Javascript was allowed, and was used to "kick" people via
| DM.
|
| It was usually just a link with an onhover that popped up an
| "enter the password" prompt, followed by an infinite loop of
| alerts if you didn't get the password within five tries. For some
| reason no one ever just deleted the password prompt and did an
| immediate alert-loop. We all just c/p'd the same password code,
| and just changed the password.
|
| I did once get hit by some malformed JS that crashed Netscape as
| soon as you received it. It was the only instant-kill I ever saw.
| I think literally everything else was onhover, and almost always
| "five tries to guess the password". (I eventually learned to view
| source in another window.)
|
| I was almost entirely in TimesSquare, so it could be that spread
| to one of the other chats immediately led to the "switch to
| Java", which was indeed a very sad day.
| q845712 wrote:
| Geocities HTML chat was my first chatroom experience. IIRC my
| friend found it because they had purchased "chat.com" and had it
| forwarding to some chatroom? But I could be wrong about that
| honestly, curious if anyone else remembers.
|
| I did pay it an homage at a couple of points, before slack
| completely took over, by writing a simple unsanitized HTML
| chatroom, hosting it on my own work computer, and telling my
| coworkers to all go to 192.168.x.y/chat or something -- the kind
| of thing you can do at small companies when you only have a
| couple dozen coworkers. It was incredibly entertaining to me (and
| some others) and I did it at two companies, but I was a little
| surprised that nobody ever said "hey this reminds me of geocities
| chat"!
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(page generated 2023-06-27 23:01 UTC)