A lot of people dabbled in early internet by using places like Angelfire to express themselves. And until just a few weeks ago, those early internet sites were still there for everyone to enjoy..
They are now gone.
People who didn’t live through it won’t get it. ICQ numbers and AOL names as a contact? People saying “welcome to my page” At the top like you were entering some type of business meeting.. Awkward family photos.. Guestbooks you are being asked to sign!? My ICQ was ICQ NUMBER: 29085260..
This was a great time to be alive during the old internet era. We were like pioneers in the wild west. Sure, by comparison to the wild west and the Oregon Trail game, it’s a much safer environment, and the biggest danger we had was not cholera or smallpox, but instead dial-up connections. However, we were charting new ground. Back then, people didn’t quite know what to make of it. Were things real? Were people real? You couldn’t really tell but chances are in the early net, people exploring online were actually the real thing.
A lot of people were on various pages like Angelfire and GeoCities. And when these pages go away, it creates some sort of a strange void.
It’s almost like thinking your local mall is still open, and then you show up just to see it got knocked down.
There is no Angelfire anymore. And if you had, from the late 1990s to the very early 2000s, anything with family-related events or photographs or stories or blogs, it’s gone. It may still exist on Archive.org, thankfully for that, but for the most part, the real pages of what existed are all gone. Depending on how you felt about yourself 26 years ago, you may or may not like that an archive still exists …
It’s interesting because a lot of people most likely had family websites on Angelfire, and they don’t even know that those pages are gone now. By the time Angelfire told its users that the pages were shutting down, most people had already tuned out. Many didn’t even assume their pages were still working. I, for one, knew mine were still up all these 27 years later. I would go back to them now and then, maybe three or four times per year, just for the fun of it. It was when I went back recently that I discovered it was gone. Then I did some more research and realized they are all gone.
It is like corporate fast food chains. Everyone decries how now they all look the same.. same color, same design, modern. All the colors from the past are gone. The same thing happened with Angelfire and GeoCities. Think about those moving GIF backgrounds. They were horrible to read. You couldn’t tell what the font looked like. The horror sites had blood dripping down. Other sites had sports GIFs all over the place. It was chaotic and even at times ridiculous.
But they were the days.
Let me just picture it. You go to some Angelfire website, and the first thing you see is a GIF of a dancing Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. It has nothing to do with the page. But that’s because the person who made the page loved Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. That’s what Angelfire was like, just a big, giant collection of junk and gunk with words in between. Like AI slop now, but just edited and created by real humans to express their own personal slop.. emblematic of the person who created it.
Angelfire is actually what led me to learn HTML coding. Now listen, my coding is not really as necessary these days as it once was because of AI or structured websites that are already created for people in a box, but back then, you had to learn the old-fashioned way. Not only were you on Angelfire and your mom was telling you to get off the internet so she could make a phone call, but you were in the middle of saving your index with HTML coding, which might have broken the entire thing, and you just couldn’t find out until mom was done with that call.
No calls cut us off now, but internet outages still happen, and when they happen, now they’re bigger.
I think in a way people will look back and romanticize things like Angelfire a lot more than what they deserve. Let’s face it, it wasn’t the easiest time, and the websites were clearly not the nicest. But it was something. It was almost like your little space on the internet—somewhat like what MySpace was. Literally the term “MySpace.” Then Facebook came around and changed the game. Things always come around and change the game. That’s okay, it’s the natural progression of how these things work.
But what seems to be painful is that with all the changes, we’re running out of space for the old stuff. The old internet was extremely important, and people who didn’t live through it will never quite understand or appreciate the daily happenings online. There was no social media and had to learn how to find things yourself instead of things being sent to you because of an algorithm. You sought out websites and found your favorite writers or bloggers and communicated with people in a personal way.
Social media is constant now. So much so that it’s overwhelming. This is not natural for our minds, folks.
But back then, you were slower about this. You were more methodical and could carve your path on the internet the way you wanted to, not the way a corporation would feed it to you.
There are people out there who have done their best at preserving the internet. Some have preserved GeoCities. I don’t know if Angelfire was ever really preserved the same way. GeoCities felt like one of the first real blog-style platforms where people kept updating things, and eventually that morphed into Blogger and everything else that followed. Angelfire felt different because it was more static. More like a personal statement. A website before websites became what they are now.
Angelfire didn’t collapse because of some dramatic scandal. It just… faded. Lycos, its parent company, quietly shut down the free hosting after years of decline. The internet moved on. People moved on. The infrastructure got old and the demand disappeared. And one day, something that existed for decades just didn’t anymore.
Because people say the internet is forever.
It’s not.
