AirLockAlpha.com

Here it is. www.GeoCities.com/Area51/Hollow/9416. A rather long URL, but one I will never forget.

That address has huge historical significance to me, and probably at least some to you if you're reading this. It's because of that address, because of GeoCities really, that this site exists today.

It was the first home of Airlock Alpha, which launched on GeoCities Aug. 13, 1998 as SyFy World. And as of today, any remnants that are left of GeoCities is gone.

Yahoo!, which bought GeoCities about a year after Airlock Alpha's predecessor was founded, decided to close the Web presence that was a development ground for Web creators in the 1990s. It was the place where a good friend of mine built a small fan site for the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and inspired to try something along the lines of my own passion, build what would become the focus of my life for the next decade.

The same month this site started, GeoCities went public, selling initially for $17 a share, and growing as high as $100 per share during the Dotcom bubble. In 1999, Yahoo! would purchase the company for $3.6 billion in stock. However, it's unlikely GeoCities ever really made any money. Even before its purchase by Yahoo!, it was losing millions of dollars a year.

But it was still a place to be creative, to be published, to be noticed. And it was the place where many things would be born, including what is now the name of a popular science-fiction themed cable network.

After hearing a few months back that Yahoo! was intending to close GeoCities, I tried to explore some memories I had of the area and what was our home in the sci-fi-heavy Area51. But to be honest, I don't remember much except doing everything I could to get visitors to the site, and to be able to pronounce "SyFy" the correct way.

The Internet was such a different place then. There were no blogs. There really were no search engines outside of Yahoo! and AltaVista (the IPO of GeoCities and the founding of what would later become Airlock Alpha even predate Google). Web sites depended on each other to help promote it online, which was still reserved for the ultra-geek, but was slowly starting to get some mainstream traction.

You had some of the big boys out there -- a few that would even get bought up during the Dotcom bubble, and then you had those who were just getting by. The rest of us were on GeoCities, enjoying free Internet space and bandwidth.

When Yahoo! bought GeoCities in 1999, they pushed many of its "homesteaders" out the door when they changed the terms of service which made people believe Yahoo! was claiming ownership of their content. To be honest, I never believed that was their intent. They were claiming the right to reproduce the content, but in the form of creating backups on servers and the like. But the negative publicity Yahoo got for the perception of trying to claim ownership of others' creation was enough for them to rewrite their policy.

Despite that, we stuck around on GeoCities, and really didn't leave until early 2001 when we joined TrekNation. Nothing really chased us away. We just wanted to have more bandwidth and associate ourselves with a site -- TrekToday -- that was getting regular mentions in major print media, which really was unheard of.

We left behind our GeoCities pages, and felt they would always be somewhere in the world of GeoCities. But that world is coming to an end.

It was a great run, but your place in history is secure. Thank you, GeoCities, for making all this possible. If it weren't for you, there wouldn't be an us.