Before the web got good at being a business, it was somebody's home.

Before Geocities, publishing on the internet meant knowing a server admin or paying for hosting. GeoCities (born November 1994, Beverly Hills, as "Beverly Hills Internet") handed out 2MB of free space and called the result a homestead — not a file directory, a home. The question that pulled millions in wasn't "how do I build a website" — it was "what does mycorner of the internet look like?"

The pull is the same one behind every personal blog, MySpace page, and link-in-bio site since: prove this patch of the internet is mine, then decorate every inch of it.

1. Nov 1994 — Beverly Hills Internet launches with six neighborhoods: Colosseum, Hollywood, RodeoDrive, SunsetStrip, WallStreet, WestHollywood.
2. Jul 1995 — CapitolHill, Paris, SiliconValley, and Tokyo are added — the metaphor goes global.
3. Dec 15, 1995 — Renamed GeoCities. By 1996: 29 neighborhoods, thousands of new homesteaders daily.
4. Jan 28, 1999 — Yahoo! acquires GeoCities for $3.57 billion, at the time the internet's third most-visited site.
5. Jul 1999 — Yahoo replaces neighborhood URLs with vanity URLs — the geography metaphor, the actual soul of the brand, quietly erased.
6. Apr–Oct 2009 — Yahoo announces closure; Archive Team races to rescue an estimated 10 terabytes before the Oct 26 shutdown.

David Bohnett and John Rezner built the platform, but the actual design language of GeoCities was authored by millions of amateurs with no training and no client: a teenager building a sitcom fan page, a garage band posting tour dates, a hobbyist cataloguing every Pokémon, a grandmother sharing a casserole recipe. None of them had a brief — they had Notepad, a free plot, and total creative permission.

That's why a real GeoCities page stacks every trick it can — tiled wallpaper, rainbow text, a MIDI on load. If you finally have a home on the web, you decorate every wall of it at once.