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GeoCities dies in March 2019, and with it a piece of internet history

Nothing quite captured that 1990s internet aesthetic like GeoCities.

Gordon Gottsegen CNET contributor
Gordon Gottsegen is a tech writer who has experience working at publications like Wired. He loves testing out new gadgets and complaining about them. He is the ghost of all failed Kickstarters.
Gordon Gottsegen
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A screenshot of a GeoCities site.

One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age/Tumblr

The internet in the 1990s was filled to the brim with flashy text art, pixelated graphics, neon colors and broken HTML. Yet somehow, those were simpler times.

The web-hosting site GeoCities was a paragon of this early internet era, but in March 2019 (almost 25 years after its creation in 1994) it'll cease to exist.

Yahoo Japan announced that it would shut down GeoCities.co.jp on March 31, 2019. Yahoo bought GeoCities in 1999 for $3.6 billion. In 2009 Yahoo shut down GeoCities in the US, but for some reason spared GeoCities Japan. When Yahoo shuts down GeoCities Japan in 2019, the life of GeoCities will finally come to an end.

If you're nostalgic about the '90s internet aesthetic, you have a few months to explore GeoCities-styled webpages before they're taken down.