One thousand: this is the number shown by the visitor counter on the Omer Pesquer website. He took it upon himself to take a screenshot, for posterity. It’s 1997 and at that time, remember, “A thousand visitors, it was crazy”.
Her page with a pastel pink background, created for designer Stéphane Blanquet, was then hosted on Geocities, one of the most popular web platforms at the time. “The colors were bold, I put animated gifs, repeating patterns… Since then, the Web has become very clean.” observes this 58-year-old Parisian, who began creating sites very early, at a time when the Internet was beginning to be implemented in French homes.
“There was a bit of a punk side: we didn’t know how to do it, we got by, we had fun, we weren’t afraid. Geocities was a kind of happy, naive and creative period. We didn’t realize we were pioneers. » Thanks to your screenshot, their site remained frozen in time and, fortunately, like all the others, was simply deleted when Geocities closed fifteen years ago.
“Now you had a home on the web”
The Geocities adventure began in November 1994. David Bohnett, an American computer scientist with a business background, became passionate about an innovation he heard about through a magazine: the Web. A wonder, for those who trust World have been “Jealous of the French Minitel”. With computer scientist John Rezner he founded the company Beverly Hills Internet, which offered some companies the possibility of hosting their first web pages. It won’t stop there: “I said, why not let people create and host their site for free? There were probably other people as fascinated as I was by this window to the world, but I didn’t know how many. It was a wonderful surprise. »
Success is dazzling. “As soon as someone signed up, my computer would go “ding!” I loved it, it was “ding!” and again “ding!”, then he started “ding!” ten times a second, twenty-four hours a day. » Beyond being free, one of the keys to the service’s success lies in its organization into “districts”, in which the Internet user had to register their page: “Hollywood” for movie sites, “SiliconValley” for computer sites, “Tokyo” for Japanese animation, etc. To better accommodate this idea, the company was renamed Geocities in 1995.
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