After my last post I started searching round for timelines and details about early web hosting companies like Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, etc. and I found a pretty neat timeline from The History of the Web site. Of particular interest was not only that tripod.com pre-dated Geocities.com by a couple of months (Tripod.com was registered on September 29, 1994 and Geocities in November). But Tripod was not up and running until 1995 framing itself as a hosting service specifically for college students to create a space for themselves online:
Tripod
The domain name for Tripod is registered, pre-dating most other free web hosting services like Geocities and Angelfire. Tripod’s explicit goal is to give college students a way of setting up a spot for themselves on the web, though it would eventually come to be known as an easy-to-use service for free web homepages.
Nothing new under the web’s sun. Reclaim roots! I was now intrigued, and I wanted to get a better look at Tripod back in the day, and the Wayback Machine has a mint screenshot from December 21, 1996.
Tripod.com on Dec. 21, 1996
I took the screenshot using the Full Page Screen Capture extension in Chrome, and I’m liking it. I think the whole page is interesting because of the dead space in the bottom right, and the links all the way down on the left are telling. I also like the Fidelity Investments banner ad. At the end of 1996 the service claims to have 150,000 users, a number that seems almost quaint two years for a web-based tech company. I also like the branding with AOL as a “Members’ Choice” site. So much goodness here, so going to add this as another possible site for the OWLTEH exhibit. Are these posts jumpstarting your 90s memory? If so, post a link using this form to a site from the 90s with your description to be considered for the Exhibit happening in Coventry in exactly two weeks.
