I remember that I learned HTML from http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2090 -- I can still remember the URL, in the Athens neighborhood -- but I haven't seen the actual webpage in 23 years. I'd love to find an archived copy.
I spent so much of my early teenage years on Geocities, Angelfire, EzBoards, AIM, ICQ. It's all but vanished.
We should have done a much better job with preservation.
I'm hoping someone will one day bump into un-formatted hard drives from some of these old web hosting companies and resurrect the content.
It's weird to feel so much nostalgia for intangible things.
It's also weird to reminisce about youth. Despite all of the new tech, and the wealth and career I've built, and the people I've met, I sometimes wish I could relive the early 2000s. It feels like all of the adventure and newness has been sucked out of the world. And then I snap out of it.
I wonder if they'll even look back, at all. Even newspapers post articles linking to tweets or youtube, or articles elsewhere, without mirroring anything. Those will be much more useless than pure text articles that at least describe what they reference. Social media, HN, reddit -- so much is just a stream of things. Permanence and curation, something like building a library, those ideas seem rather abandoned.
I would code my HTML on paper in class and then type it up during lunch or once I got home from school. What a time!