# Timeline

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`2019-03-05`

Here on this page is a list of somewhat noticeable events that occurred due to Neocities.

# The 90's: The Birth of The Web

The 1990's was no-doubt one of the most important decade in human history; not only was the World Wide Web made, but better yet the US Government and the UN would adopt it in full force. Noting will be able to stop the Information Superhighway in this decade.

## 1991: The Birth of The Web

This year was an important year for the tech world, not only was the Web made public, but the OS Linux was also released.

6 August 6 August 1991: Tim Berners-Lee announces the World Wide Web project and software on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. The first website, "info.cern.ch" is created.

23 August The Web became available for everyone.

17 September Linux made its initial release.

1 December The first web server outside of Europe goes online.

## 1992: The Birth of The Mobile Phone

The first known companion virus called the Globe was first detected, apart from this nothing much happened this year.

6 April: Microsoft releases Windows 3.1, the official support for Windows 3.1 would end on 31 December 2001.

3 December Neil Papworth used his personal computer to send the first SMS text message to Richard Jarvis' phone.

## 1993: The Government Goes Online

1993 was another large stepping stone for the tech world, in this year, current US President Bill Clinton would put the White House and the United Nations online, he would also help start the .gov and .org top-level domains. This year would also see the rise of the mobile phone, one of man's most powerful tools.

Another important event would be CERN releasing the Web source code and making it public domain.

c. January Only 50 Web servers are known to exist so far.

22 April NCSA releases the Mosaic browser.

30 April CERN releases the Web source code and made it public domain.

24 June The first ever live streaming takes place by the band Severe Tire Damage. This event was seen live in Australia and other locations over the Internet.

## 1994: The Information Superhighway

1994 saw the birth of ANSI, also in this year, Vice President Al Gore makes a speech where he coins the term "Information Superhighway". This year also saw the birth of Yahoo!, Netscape, T-Mobile, CNET among other companies are formed.

12 May ANSI was approved the ATA standard.

13 October: Mosaic Netscape 0.9, the first Netscape browser was officially released, this browser would also introduces the Internet to Cookies.

27 October Hotwired sold the first web banner ad to AT&T and began to run the first Internet banner ad campaign.

c. November Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) was founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner. BHI would later be renamed as "GeoCities".

1 November Amazon.com is made

17 December The style sheet language is made public.

28 December Live.com was registered.

## 1995: When Two Tribes Go To War

This year saw the rise of the Dot-Com Boom thanks to a number of companies releasing Web browsers, mainly Microsoft.

The Data Protection Directive, also known as Directive 95/46/EC, is adopted by the European Union this yeal also.

18 January Yahoo.com domain was registered.

c. February Netscape introduced SSL.

1 March Yahoo! was incorporated.

1 April The Opera browser version 1 was released to the public

16 August Microsoft released Internet Explorer to the world.

24 August Microsoft brings out Windows 95, and sold more than 1 million copies within four days.

8 June PHP was publicly released.

22 November Microsoft come-out with IE 2.0, and officially started the browser war with Netscape.

4 December Sun Microsystems announced JavaScript and released it in Netscape 2.0B3. In the same year, they also introduced Java.

## 1996: Archiving The Web

1996 was the year the web-host Angelfire was founded. 1996 was also the first time that more E-Mails were sent out rather than postal mail in the USA.

12 May The Internet Archive goes online.

c. December The first CSS specification, CSS 1, was published by the W3C.

## 1997: Cult of The Dead

This year was the start of a early meme, that being the dancing baby gif that was first created by Michael Girard and later tweaked by Ron Lussier at LucasArts.

27 March The American UFO religious millenarian cult based known as Heaven's Gate that earned its money from designing websites commits a mass suicide, 39 people would die.

15 September The google.com domain name was registered after Sergey Brin and Larry Page decided to change the name of their BackRub search engine to Google.

c. December Microsoft buys out Hotmail.

## 1998: The Start of The End For Netscape

1998 saw the rise in web blogs and companies like Mozilla and PayPal. Lycos would purchased Angelfire.

25 June Microsoft Windows 98 was officially released to the world.

28 October The Digital Millennium Copyright Act becomes US law.

28 September Microsoft's Internet Explorer passes Netscape in Internet browser market share for the first time.

## 1999: Masters of The Web

The year 1999 was the rise of the so-called "Y2K bug" - a scare that computer bugs related to the formatting and storage of calendar data for dates beginning in the year 2000.

28 January GeoCities acquired by Yahoo! and was renamed to Yahoo! GeoCities, at that time it was the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web.

# The 00's: The Rise of The Web 0.2

The 90's was great, but the 00's will be even better. The 2000's will being a new period in history, more people than ever will have access to the Web, meaning billions of new Websites are born, connecting millions of people all around the world.

## 2000: The Fall of The Dot-Com Boom

The year 2000 was the start of a new beginning for people all around the world, not only was this the beginning of the end for the Dot-Com Boom, but more than half of the households in America have Internet.

1 January The world is still spinning and man has not killed himself with computers.

26 January XHTML was released.

10 March NASDAQ reports that it has hit its record high and marked the turning point of the dot-com boom.

21 April The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act became effective.

17 August For the first time, more than half of Americans households have access to the Net, as according to Nielsen.

## 2001: The Years of Decay

Noting really much happened in 2001 in the tech world. The Xbox game console came-out this year, Google Image Search was introduced and Google also acquired its first public acquisition: Deja.com's Usenet Service, that would be renamed as Google Groups.

20 April Dell computers became the largest PC maker.

27 August Microsoft releases IE 6.0.

## 2002: The Birth of Creative Commons

2002 would see the birth of the Creative Commons, allowing people to edit and share other's work.

15 January Creative Commons (CC) was first made public, they expand the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share.

3 June Napster filed for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

23 September The first code for what would become Firefox was made available.

25 November Roxio acquires the Napster name, and logo in a bankruptcy auction.

## 2003: The Power Gods Come Crashing Down

This year sees the release of a new Microsoft OS along with the start of The Mozilla Foundation.

28 March Windows XP comes-out to public release.

30 June The Apple Web browser Safari is first released.

15 July The Mozilla Foundation was officially formed.

## 2004: Crusader's of The World Wide Web

2004 saw the birth of Firefox, one of the most used Web browsers even today.

1 July Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, COPPA, takes effect. COPPA is a US act for websites to not collect information on all users under the age of 13.

9 November Firefox 1.0 was first introduced.

## 2005: Money, Money, Money

Not many events too place in 2005.

c. November The term "Cyber Monday" was first coined by Shop.org, Cyber Monday is the first Monday following Black Friday, which is the day after the US holiday Thanksgiving.

## 2006: You Have The Power

In this year Skype announced that it had over 100 million registered users, Disney purchases Pixar for $7.4 billion, and TIME magazine person of The Year was named as "You". Wix.com was also started.

26 January jQuery was first introduced.

## 2007: More Competition

In this year web host company Weebly was founded by Chris Fanini, Dan Veltri, and David Rusenko.

## 2008: The End of The War

This year marks the end of the browser war with the winner being Microsoft.

8 February GitHub (originally known as Logical Awesome LLC) is now online.

1 March AOL ends its support for the Netscape Internet browser, meaning that Internet Explorer has won the browser war.

## 2009: Death of Geocities

``

> [Yahoo!] found the way to destroy the most massive amount of history in the shortest amount of time with absolutely no recourse

- Internet Atrocity! GeoCities' Demise Erases Web History, By Dan Fletcher, TIME Magazine.

23 April Yahoo! announced that it would be closing GeoCities in the United States, and stopped accepting new registrations, though the existing GeoCities accounts remain active.

Late June Yahoo! updated the GeoCities home page to indicate: "GeoCities is closing on October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files. If you'd like to move your web site, or save the images and other files you've posted online, please act now by downloading your files or upgrading to Yahoo! Web Hosting".

The Internet Archive tries to archive everything from GeoCities.

26 October GeoCities in the United States, Canada and Europe go offline.

# The 10's: The Rise of a New Hope

With the death of Geocities in the wing mirror, many people were unable to express theirself online apart from filling out lines on a Facebook about me page.

## 2010

Nothing much happened in the tech world this year.

OpenStack was established in this year, along with the file format WebM, and Google Web Fonts - now just Google Fonts.

## 2011

c. March WebGL was released by the Mozilla Foundation.

10 May Microsoft announced it plans to acquire Skype for $8.5 billion in cash.

## 2012: Shut it Down

2012 was the year that the the Raspberry Pi single-board computer came out in the UK.

18 January

Computer Hope, Craigslist, Google, Reddit, Twitter, Wikipedia, and more than 115,000 other websites go dark in protest of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA).

## 2013: The Start

2013 was the year that Neocities first went online.

24 May Neocities goes online.

Also on this day, Kyle Drake tweets out "I want to make another Geocities. Free web hosting, static HTML only, 10MB limit, anonymous, uncensored."

28 May The first Neocities blog post is made.

3 June Lando becomes the first Neocities' user (excluding Kyle Drake's site).

21 June First Archive of Neocities.org is made.

2 July Meghan Neal of Vice's Motherboard writes an article talking about how "Neocities is recreating the garish, Web 1.0 creativity of GeoCities".

7 July Nick Stockton of Wired writes the article "NeoCities Wants to Save Us From the Crushing Boredom of Social Networking".

14 July Wikipedia page on Neocities is made.

## 2014: The Community Grows

In 2014 the Neocities community started to grow, this may be thanks to the news articles on the host from the time.

8 May Neocities puts on a rate limit of a "dialup modem speed" for the FCC, due to the FCC's proposal to scrap Net Neutrality.

5 September Jon Brodkin of Ars Technica writes an article talking about the Neocities FCC rate limit speed.

14 September The Network Neighborhood, one of the most popular Neocities webrings, goes online.

10 October Steven Melendez of Co.Design writes "Oh, Snap! '90s Web Design Is Hot Again", an article that features Neocities.

# 2015: A Time Of Changes

One of the most important events that took place in 2015 was perhaps the Neocities Kickstarter and the articles on the web host.

3 January Sarah Lagan of The Royal Gazette writes an article talking about how some children were learning to be "web wizards" thanks to Neocities.

25 June The Neocities Kickstarter is setup by Kyle Drake & Victoria Wang.

4 February Neocities have removed the FCC rate limit speed.

5 February Freeman Murray of Quartz briefly talks about Neocities in "If you want your own tech company, forget an MBA-and learn to code instead".

17 July Amber Case of Recode writes an article called "Why We All Need to Make the Internet Fun Again".

18 September J.M. Porup of Vice's Motherboard writes about how Neocities is one of the first major sites to implement IPFS.

25 October Jason Koebler of Vice's Motherboard writes "There's An Entire Conference Dedicated to Geocities-Style Websites".

11 November Kyle Drake tweets out "Neocities got a DDoS ransom. I replied 'fuck off'. They DDoSed, our mitigation handled it. I watched Bob Ross and went to sleep. #cyberpunk".

# 2016: Ancient Dreams

2016 was perhaps one of the most important years for Neocities, the unofficial Neocities' Discord server is made, the host gets 100,000+ sites, and Melonking starts up the (unofficial) Neocities mailing list.

7 June Quentin Hardy of The New York Times writes the article "The Web's Creator Looks to Reinvent It" that shows a photo of Kyle Drake.

5 July The Network Neighborhood is shut down, despite this, the website is still online.

31 July The unofficial Neocities' Discord server is made.

08 July OwlMan posts a news update about the end of The Network Neighborhood. The post would later be added to The OwlMan Library.

5 May Froge, of the Degenerates, founds the hit blog Froghand, starting a series of projects that nobody asked for and frankly wishes would go away.

25 August OpenBooks writes the infamous open letter about how "You're doing Neocities wrong".

27 October Neocities now has 100,000 sites.

2 December Melonking starts up the (unofficial) Neocities mailing list.

# 2017:

1 January Neocities defaults to HTTPS (rather than HTTP) on all subdomains.

6 January All websites on Neocities are now HTTPS.

20 January Kyle Drake does an impromptu Neocities Q&A on Hacker News.

8 February booil becomes the first website to receive a tip of five US Dollars from Kyle Drake.

17 February 118,000 websites and counting.

27 April Neocities starts up the Trump Plan, where if you pay $100 a month you can get 2 MBs of storage.

10 July Spriteclad (formally 98plus), the second most followed site on Neocities, leaves Neocities in favour of DigitalOcean.

22 July The webring our space is made.

8 August Neocities now has 140,000 sites.

17 August OwlMan writes a post on his blog called "I'm Quitting Neocities", making fun of Spriteclad's farewell from Neocities blog post. Soon, other Neocitie websites would copy this idea, this would become one of the first Neocitie memes.

17 August Spriteclad removes the farewell letter from their website and stops The Internet Archive from indexing their website, they would also delete the good bye letter on their Neocities website.

18 August Neocities user Melonking launches Daniel's Network.

22 August Neocities now has one bilbon hits

4 September This page is made.

7 September After a whole year of no updates, The Network Neighborhood updates its landing page. While what the update is not obvious, when you view the source code, you will soon see the message.

29 September Kratzen (also known as "Froge") post "And add me to the Neotime page: '2016-05-20: Froge, of the Degenerates, founds the hit blog Froghand, starting a series of projects that nobody asked for and frankly wishes would go away'" on OwlMan's profile.

29 December The Vsauce channel DONG makes a video called "How Far Away Is Andromeda?", where they link to the Neocities website How far away is Andromeda?

## 2018: Ongoing Events

It's still 2018!

23 January Neocities' use Gwta makes a post on OwlMan's profile telling him that her school network is blocking parts of his site, as it "contains web content". OwlMan would make a post on his website later that day writing about how he found it to be funny.

20 February akeOnline write on his profile "all neocities subdirectories have been blocked by my school because people were going to a cookie cooker rehost. thanks, javasnake!".

10 April Retroity publishes the article "The Neocities Problem" where they talk about the downsides of using the web host.

13 May yoshi295295 makes the nocities Discord server after a hissy fit with RocketMix, soon Mariteaux would take over as owner of the server.

27 May For some reason, Mariteaux makes a new Neocities Doscord server called "Neocities 2.0", the server was made so there would be "No overhead, no busybody mods, no drama, none of that. We started this to get away from all that. As long as you're not being obnoxious or doing something illegal, come as you are". The server would later be called "Penelope's Place" after the Necities' mascot of the same name. Also on this day the old nocities server was removed.