Y is for Year Zero: Grunge killed hair metal. Acid house changed everything. Punk saw off progressive rock. These dividing-line stories are always attractive, always useful for a while— and then always revised. The grandfather of them all, though, has proved harder to shift— the idea that something happened in the early-to-mid-fifties to mark a change of era and fix a boundary of relevance. The next 10 or 20 years, as the 60s slip deeper into unlived collective memory, will be crucial and fascinating (for historians, anyway!).

— Current music criticism, from A to Z. I always had some trouble with the myth that pop music started with network television, somewhere in the 1950s, at the time of Elvis’ or Buddy Holly’s first appearences. (via The Null Device)

Newsweek points us to the very interesting Internet Archaeology. Of the above, they comment “This is where it all began to go wrong”.

I agree.

Gerard Van der Leun found a stash of photos of Los Angeles taken by Ansel Adams in the early 1940s. I love the pulp magazines in the front. (via Kottke)

The History of the Internet in a Nutshell

Parts of it are a bit thin (it’s history in a nutshell, duh!), but it is a good enough script for a class on the History of the Internet (which I now do - got myself another teaching gig, on the subject of Art and Multimedia Communication, yeah!). It just needs some meat - some general background about the history of computing, and interesting stuff like Douglas Engelbart’s demo, object-oriented programming and the GUI.

Unfortune Cookie

Webapp of the day: Unfortunate Cookie presents you with… misfortune cookies. The interesting thing about it is that it mines data off the Footnote.com historical document database, therefore backing its predictions with weird newspaper articles from the past.

892: Sigurd the Mighty of Orkney strapped the head of a defeated foe to his leg, the tooth of which grazed against him as he rode his horse, causing the infection which killed him.

— The Wikipedia’s List of unusual deaths, ranging from the funny and stupid to the appaling and gruesome. Some are all that. (via The Null Device)

That’s a screenshot of After Effects 1.1, released in 1993 by the Company of Science and Art (bought almost immediately by Aldus, which would merge with Adobe a couple of years later). Even though the current, ninth version, obviously looks quite different, the way some things are instantly recognizable is uncanny (or it’s just me, who’ve used AE since version five). AE Portal News has the After Effects 1.1 demo reel, which is an interesting flashback into early 90s motion graphics (people did like Futura Condensed!).

Sexy People intends to be “a celebration of the perfect portrait”. It certainly is. I bet the fine photo of an Italian gentleman above was well-regarded when taken, but I guess many of the portraits on the site were seen as bad pictures at the time they were taken, and dropped to the bottom of a shoebox. That is why I very rarely delete digital photos, some of the pictures that look crappy now will probably be the most interesting someday. (via Johanna Reed)

Yahoo will close Geocities later this year. For those who don’t know (because damn - I’ve got colleagues who were in elementary school by the time I first went to college and got on the internet), Geocities was the free web hosting service when I first bought a 33.6 kbps modem and got on the Internet in 1997, a time synonymous with browsing the web with Netscape Navigator running on Windows 95, comparing searches between giants Yahoo and Altavista, and expressing yourself with personal homepages, probably hosted at Geocities.

I had my first personal page - which included a small bio, a couple of movie reviews and some pictures of my town Porto (scanned at a friend’s, using his handheld scanner!) - hosted at the two megabytes of server space my ISP kindly provided at an address I’ll never forget - homepage.esoterica.pt/~edsousa - which was an unbelieveably short URL in those days. Since the space was short I signed up for a Geocities account which provided me an extra megabyte of web-presence, which I used for some sort of porfolio website (showing some bad art made up with Corel Draw! and Paint Shop Pro, which in pure 90s style displayed very liberal use of effects and filters).

In typical cyberpunkish fashion, Geocities’ URLs had plenty of metaphor - it’s a cybercity, ain’t it? - therefore you couldn’t choose your desired URL, instead you would pick from a selection of e-street addresses, or whatever, so my Geocities URL was something impossible to remember - geocities.com/Colosseum/Stadium/7764/ - it seems somehow I got myself an address intended for sports webpages.

Anyway, that’s all ancient web history now. Since then we’ve seen people thinking selling pets online would be a good idea leading to the dotcom bust, John Barger starting a different kind of personal webpage, starting the weblogging trend and the not-so-sad demise of those “Welcome to Ed’s Personal Homepage, here’s a picture of my cat” sites, the rise of web apps and social websites and the laptop-at-the-coffeehouse crowd, people no longer lonely and unproductive in their rooms, but lonely and unproductive in public spaces.

Through all this, it seems, Geocities continued to exist. In fact, I recently found out a friend’s website still existed - and I hope you’ll forgive me when I say it is indeed the quintessential Geocities webpage (which, at least, is a lot more interesting than finding the same Blogger template for the thousandth time). So I hope Yahoo doesn’t knock the whole thing offline when the closing time comes, but freezes it instead. It is a very important artifact of early web history.

In a very strange way, Geocities will be missed.

The Panasonic Design Museum website brings out good memories of old gadgets you never had… I really like this charming Radio Cassette Recorder from 1967.