A one-person oral history of Geocities HTML Chat (2022)

There was definitely a solid period much longer than a day where Javascript was allowed, and was used to "kick" people via DM.

It was usually just a link with an onhover that popped up an "enter the password" prompt, followed by an infinite loop of alerts if you didn't get the password within five tries. For some reason no one ever just deleted the password prompt and did an immediate alert-loop. We all just c/p'd the same password code, and just changed the password.

I did once get hit by some malformed JS that crashed Netscape as soon as you received it. It was the only instant-kill I ever saw. I think literally everything else was onhover, and almost always "five tries to guess the password". (I eventually learned to view source in another window.)

I was almost entirely in TimesSquare, so it could be that spread to one of the other chats immediately led to the "switch to Java", which was indeed a very sad day.

I feel very fortunate to have been around for this part of internet culture. Chat was so different at the time; this part especially stuck out to me:

>Our MC Skat Kat posted from the persona of this fictional MC Skat Kat, regularly referring to Paula Abdul as his girlfriend. Everyone simply accepted this.

You would see the same essentially-anonymous users every day, and there were users with known-unlikely stories - this is before catfishing as a concept was part of the lexicon - but they were just accepted. Did I think that I was talking, at 13, to Demi Moore about Bruce Willis's latest movie? No, I did not. But someone got online every night to just shoot the shit and pretend to be Demi Moore, and they were just one of the gang. No one believed them but no one tried to prove them wrong, either, because they were otherwise a good citizen. It was surreal, but at the time human interaction in real-time over the internet with strangers WAS surreal, in itself. No one could prove or disprove anything without a lot of work, so people just tended to shrug at wild claims.

I know that newer generations are all experiencing their own forms of social-media-ingrouping that they will feel just as nostalgic for, but it truly was a unique time.

I was there! I dialed up my connection, and went straight to http://timessquarechat.geocities.com (later gameschat.geocities.com), my fingers still remember. I was a 15 years old kid in the city of Omsk, Siberia; and nearly everyone else was from the US. I was talking to strangers with my broken English, and everyone was real, someone with a story. Fun times!

Speaking of Geocities, there is a modern reincarnation called Neocities: https://neocities.org

The implementation detail with the infinite document size is surprising! I remember the HTML chatrooms from that era on other sites, and IIRC a lot of them worked via a meta tag that just told the browser to refresh the page every so often.

I still have friends whom I met in chatrooms from around 1996ish using that technique.

It was fairly common to use the "trick" (not sure it really was a trick, maybe someone else remembers) where the connection/transaction was kept open. Sites displaying logs, for example, used it as well. As I recall, they used "Transfer-Encoding: chunked", where instead of including a content size, the data consisted of said chunks that were all prefaced with their size, and you could send arbitrarily many.

That way, the browser could parse and display each chunk as it was received. A 0-sized chunk would be the last one, but you did not have to send it.

I don't recall exactly what came first. It's well possible that "chunked" only appeared in HTTP/1.1, but that HTTP/1.0 maybe did not need it since it closed the connection after handling a request anyway, or some such.

This is interesting. Reminds me of how every now and then I try and find information on old chats I remember, particularly those that used software called iChat. Yahoo! Chat used it for a time as did the Metallica.com chatroom, it was some sort of browser plugin and for a brief moment in time it was the best thing on the Internet. I met people from all over the world through that software and I always found it odd that information was so scant on it.

Geocities HTML chat was my first chatroom experience. IIRC my friend found it because they had purchased "chat.com" and had it forwarding to some chatroom? But I could be wrong about that honestly, curious if anyone else remembers.

I did pay it an homage at a couple of points, before slack completely took over, by writing a simple unsanitized HTML chatroom, hosting it on my own work computer, and telling my coworkers to all go to 192.168.x.y/chat or something -- the kind of thing you can do at small companies when you only have a couple dozen coworkers. It was incredibly entertaining to me (and some others) and I did it at two companies, but I was a little surprised that nobody ever said "hey this reminds me of geocities chat"!

What a delightful article to read. The early days of the web and internet were indeed wild.

If I recall well, geocities html chat and the java applet (which was indeed a cots,used as well on chatmefree and the like) were existing at the same time (or maybe only on chatmefree? Memory is fuzzy),these communities were great and I really loved them. It might also be the cause of different fuck up in my life but it's another matter.

When yahoo killed these chat rooms,it was really the end of an era and I actually turned to MMORPG...Le sight.

This has reminded me on the amount of time I used to spend on the very early HTML forums, especially Red Alert / C&C-themed ones. The same frames-based layout. I remember Geocities much more fondly than the OP, but also hypermart, which was one of the first free web hosts to allow CGI hosting.

I used to frequent a chat room like this, around 1998-9. I think it was absolutechat.com. I think they restricted the HTML somewhat, though, I remember there being a group of people who tried to ruin it and some of us figured out a snippet of HTML that'd just close a bunch of tags to clean up. Fun times.

Another memory: when joining a chat, the standard form just said "username enters the chat" or something along those lines, but it was just an HTML form, and the entry text was just a hidden input.You could write your own form that would give a different entry message. A few Geocities sites had a dropdown to select from a few options. I believe I had (probably copied from somewhere else) a form that had both dropdowns and an option to choose a freeform input for your entry text.

FTA: "Geocities was a formative website for the older millennials"

Well, they got that part wrong.