I must have been 13 or 14 years old when my dad gave me my first book on HTML. I started learning tags and code structure, memorizing what went where, lots of trial and error on a notepad file back then. This was of course years before the big companies had given any serious thought to the Internet, when registering a domain cost hundreds and web hosting was an expensive and rare commodity.

The one beacon of hope for enthusiastic teens was Geocities. They offered 1 free megabyte of hosting space to do anything you wanted. At that point anything I wanted was a sad little site with: animated gif horizontal dividers of flames, pictures of superheroes, and a contact form that never worked, but it was mine and it was published, and working on it laid the groundwork of interest and knowledge that eventually led me into this line of work.

Like me tens of thousands of homesteaders took up Geocities on their offer and it became a sort of tent city in the wilderness of the internet, full of starry eyed settlers looking to find a place in this shiny new tract of space that had been recently open to the public. The hosting was even divided into neighborhoods and each one was themed to a particular interest, and you could search through everyone’s sites, which often were as silly and useless as mine, but sometimes they were rife with information on all sorts of things. These were the first blogs, the first mySpaces, the first formative steps of an online community that would eventually become what we know now.

Being limited by that 1 megabyte was hard at first, but it taught us about file sizes and the importance of frugal code. It taught us about the varying efficiencies of image formats, and how to reuse assets, it taught us to do more with a whole lot less. We have since outgrown that first meg of space, and it’s been more than a decade since I’ve used my Geocities account, relegating it to the toy bin of younger years, but if it hadn’t been for that first tiny piece of the internet a lot of us wouldn’t be here.

Thanks.

About Pablo Tirado

I'm the VP and sales manager at ML Studio. I have the pleasure of selling what my brother makes (which is awesome websites). I write with varying degrees of frequency here at fixthepixel.com, over at wpgpr.org, and on livesanjuan.com. You can also follow me on twitter @pabloiv